Dr. B. Seemanii on the Mammoth-tree of Upper California. 163 



Chronicle for 1 854, p. 22) that that enterprising traveller was 

 not within 120 miles of the Mammoth Grove; and in the other 

 localities in which the tree has as yet been discovered, it has not 

 been found attaining the height which Douglas records. We 

 may therefore fairly conclude that Douglas did not see the 

 Mammoth-trees, and that until the year 1850 these monsters of 

 the vegetable creation were totally unknown to Europeans. 



The generic name of Wellingtonia did not meet with appro- 

 bation in the United States. The Americans would have felt 

 more pleased if George Washington, the father of their great 

 Republic, had been commemorated in the nomenclature; and 

 they even commenced in their newspapers an agitation against 

 the adoption of the name " Wellingtonia ,' quite ignoring that 

 the savans of their country bow to the same code of scien- 

 tific laws which govern the conduct of their European brethren, 

 and that no amount of popular clamour could cause the right of 

 priority here at stake to be set aside. When, therefore, Dr. 

 Winslow exhorted his countrymen, in grandiloquent language, 

 to call the Mammoth-tree, if it be a Taxodium, T. Washingto- 

 nianum, — if a new genus, Washingtonia Californica, — he simply 

 proclaimed to all the world that he knew nothing whatever of 

 the laws governing systematic botany. The genus Wellingtonia 

 would have suiFered nothing from this and similar attacks if 

 otherwise it had enjoyed a firm foundation. Such, however, was 

 not the case. When more perfect specimens of the tree than 

 were (in 1853) at Dr. Lindley's disposal came to hand, it was 

 found that the Mammoth-tree [Wellingtonia gigantea, Lindl.) 

 presented the same generic characters as the Redwood [Sequoia 

 sempervirens, Endl.), and that consequently Wellingtonia must 

 henceforward be considered merely as a second species of Se- 

 quoia. As far as I am aware, there are only three botanists 

 who have maintained, in print, the untenability of the genus 

 Wellingtonia, — Torrey, Decaisne, and myself. Torrey seems to 

 have been one of the first who received specimens of the tree, 

 and who arrived at the conviction that he had before him a new 

 species of Sequoia. But he refrained from publishing it ; nor 

 did he, after the institution of Wellingtonia, make it generally 

 known ; he communicated it, however, to several of his friends, 

 among them Asa Gray ; and it was the latter who first stated, iu 

 the 'American Journal of Science and Arts' (Second Series), 

 vol. xviii. p. 286, that Torrey had given to the Mammoth-tree 

 the name of Sequoia gigantea; and in August 1855, Dr. Torrey 

 made to the American Association for the Advancement of 

 Science a communication to the same effect. This remark is the 

 more necessary, as Dr. Torrey, in the ' Report on the Botany of 

 Whipple's Expedition' (Washington, 1857), p. 84 [140], refers 



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