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had developed from a twig of it brought by Seth, or it was the staff of Adam, or of Moses. All
this suggests a connection with some of the legends concerning similar dry trees in Mussulman
countries, and also with the cypress of Zoroaster, but it must not be taken for granted that
there has been here more influence from late Mazdaean or Mussulman tradition on Christian
legend than vice versa. Of course, the Dry Tree has also been sometimes conceived in
mystical reference to the tree of the Cross, and as such has entered the cycle of the Holy
Grail. In this connection, it rejoins Polo's « Lone Tree » in the capacity of the μονόδενδρον
or μονοδένδριον of Byzantine sources (cf. A. N. Veselovskiĭ, in Žurnal Min. Narodn. Prosv., Febr.
1904, 420). It must not be forgotten, either, that, according to Pseudo-Daniel, the decisive battle
is to be fought by the Saviour King at a « Lone Tree » (cf. Kampers, Vom Werdegange, 118); Polo
certainly did not know Pseudo-Daniel, but some similar notion may have been more or less current
among Christians in the East.

But Polo does not merely say that Lone Tree was called Dry Tree by the Christians, he adds
that it was so called in the Book of Alexander. As a matter of fact, no Dry Tree occurs in the ancient
redactions of Pseudo-Callisthenes, and Yule (Y, I, 132-133) had to resort to quotations which
are not quite satisfactory. I am not in a position to solve the problem either. In the Romance of
Alexander, I find a mention of the Dry Tree only in the branch known as Les vœux du Paon (« Car
les dieux du Sech arbre li ont, pièce a, promis »; cf. E. Gachet, quoted by Cordier, Odoric de Por-
denone, 25). But the poem Les vœux du paon is an interpolation, written after 1312 (cf. P. Meyer,
Alexandre le Grand dans la littérature du Moyen Age, II, 221-222), consequently too late to be
the source alluded to by Polo. Some one well versed in mediaeval literature ought to be able to provide
the solution. I may just hint to a further link between the Trees of the Sun and the Moon and the
Dry Tree. According to a belief which has found expression in Maundevile, balsam, even in Mussul-
man countries, could only be grown by Christians; this was already stated in the Image du monde,
a poem dated in 1246 A. D. (cf. Langlois, La connaissance de la nature, 174). But Maundevile
adds that balsam was said to grow also in Greater India, in the desert where the Trees of the Sun and
the Moon spoke to Alexander. In a French prose romance of Alexander, Alexander first reached
a forest of trees reminiscent of laurels and olive-trees, from which opobalsamum flowed in plenty,
then passed a very high tree without leaves or fruit (the Dry Tree ?), and finally arrived at the Trees
of the Sun and the Moon (cf. Y¹, I, 133). Now, on the Hereford map of c. 1275, near the garden
of Eden, there is a tree without leaves with the inscription : « Arbor balsami id est Arbor Sicca ».
In Polo Mss., we find in V, after the mention of the Dry Tree, the addition that « of its wood balsam is
made » (cf. Vol. I, 128).

Since the Dry Tree was located in the East, it was natural that people should look for it, and of
course find it; they even found several, which were not balsam-trees. As we have seen, Polo iden-
tified with the Dry Tree a Lone Tree which was an Oriental Plane and moreover not dry at all, pro-
bably because it was very holy and also because it stood at the further end of Persia, not far from
the Amu-daryā, for Polo the Jīhūn, one of the four rivers flowing from Paradise. His Dry Tree was
an Oriental Plane.

Maundevile speaks of a different one. According to one form of the mediaeval legend, Seth,
when allowed to put his head in at the gate of Paradise, had received from the Angel three kernels