168 WOODY PLANTS OF MASSACHUSETTS. 



choked in its earliest growth by the surrounding trees. The 

 two outer circles only were sap wood, and they were the broad- 

 est circles of all. In every instance save one, the inner circles 

 were considerably the narrowest. The inference is, that, in the 

 old forests, the chestnut grows less rapidly for the first ten or 

 fifteen years, after which it continues to increase in rapidity of 

 growth till it is upwards of forty-five or fifty years old. Grow- 

 ing from the stump, where the whole growth has been felled, it 

 springs with excessive rapidity in the earlier years. 



The chestnut tree is not only one of the most rapid growers, • 

 but it attains a great age. Some of the most remarkable trees of 

 Europe are chestnut trees. On Mount iEtna is the famous Cas- 

 tagno di cento cavalli, so called from its having sheltered a hun- 

 dred mounted cavaliers. Brydone found this, in 1770, two 

 hundred and four feet in circumference, and it had the appear- 

 ance of five distinct trees. A century before, when seen by 

 Kircher, they were united, so that probably it had been one 

 tree. The Tortworth chestnut, in England, was fifty-two feet 

 in girth in 1820, when measured by Strutt. Near Sanserre, in 

 France, is a tree of more than ten feet in diameter at six feet 

 from the ground ; it is supposed to be a thousand years old. 



The circumstances of our country are not favorable to the 

 existence of large trees. Few of them attain a great size in 

 the forest, and in few places have the largest of the forest been 

 left standing. An old tree is standing near Meeting-house Pond, 

 in Westminster, which measured fifteen feet two inches in cir- 

 cumference at the ground, in 1839, but diminished rapidly, being 

 but ten feet ten inches at four feet. An old, low tree, in the edge 

 of Stow, between that town and Bolton, on the side of a hill, 

 was fourteen feet two inches from two to five feet from the sur- 

 face. Several remarkable trees were standing, in 1840, in the 

 western part of Bolton. In July of that year, there was, on the 

 land of Joseph Houghton, an old tree with an erect undivided 

 trunk of forty or fifty feet and several large branches above, 

 which measured twenty-one feet three inches at the surface, 

 seventeen feet at three feet, and fifteen feet nine inches at six 

 feet. Another measured twenty-two feet eight inches at the sur- 

 face, seventeen feet six inches at three feet, fifteen feet six inches 



