1856.] The Mighty Cedars of California. 443 



Close by the bouse lay the first cut of tbe Big Tree, par eminence; 

 tbe remaining part, or top, had been split up and removed. Near this 

 first cut stood the stump, about six feet high, witb an arbor mounted 

 on the top, which bad been squared down for this purpose, the posts of 

 the arbor standing out in the line of the largest circuit at the ground, 

 and the space between them and the circuit of the top filled in by a 

 floor of short boards. The diameter of the top is by measurement 

 twenty-five feet one way, and twenty-three and one-half feet the other. 

 The diameter, at the ground, was thirty-one feet. They are all in- 

 cluded in a space of fifty acres, and are only about ninety in number. 

 The ground occupied is a rich wet bottom, and the foot of the moist 

 northern slope adjacent, covered also with an undergrowth. And why 

 are they here, just here, and no whre else f This, I confess is to me, 

 the greatest, strangest wonder of all, that no where in the whole earth, 

 is there another known example of these Anakims of the forest; 

 ninety seeds alone have been started, ninety and no more. Is there, 

 was there no other piece of ground but just this, in the whole world, 

 that could fitly take the seeds of such a growth ? Why have they 

 never spread, why has no one seed of the myriads they sprinkle every 

 year on the earth, ever started in any other locality? 



And what a starting it is, when such a seed of life begins to grow. 

 Little did that tiny form of matter about the size of a parsnip seed, and 

 looking more like it than any other, imagine what it was going to do, 

 what feelings to excite, when it started the first sproutings of the Big 

 Tree ! We measured an enormous sugar recently felled. Sixty feet 

 from the ground it was six feet in diameter, and was two hundred and 

 four feet high. We measured one of the prostrate giants, and two hun- 

 dred and forty feet from the ground it was six feet in diameter ! The top 

 was gone, but it could not have been less than three hundred and fifty 

 feet high. And yet this tree was only eighteen feet in diameter where the 

 Big Tree was twenty-five. If the Big Tree were hollowed, one might drive 

 the largest load of hay through it without even a brush of contact. 



Many of the trees, and all the largest of them that remain, are 

 greatly injured by fire. Their time is therefore shortened, and a long 

 time will be required to bring the smaller ones to their maximum of 

 growth. That a man, instigated by the infernal love of money, should 

 have cut down the biggest of them, and skinned the next, one hun- 

 dred and twenty feet upward from the ground, (viz : the Mother,) that 

 he might show or sell the bark of her body, both sound as a rock at 

 the heart, and good for a thousand years to come ! Oh, it surpasses 

 all contempt. And yet to see this Giant Mother still growing on as 



