108 ESSAYS. 
infer from Loudon’s description, and the ill-favored figure 
which he gives as an illustration of its general appearance in 
English parks and pleasure-grounds ;! no less than from Gil- 
pin’s complaint of its ‘ meagreness in foliage.” * 
Yet even the White Pine is overtopped by the Douglas 
Spruce (Pinus Douglasi), which forms the principal part of 
the gloomy forests of Oregon. The extraordinary height 
which this species attains was first recorded by Lewis and 
Clarke ; who state that the trunk is very commonly twenty- 
seven, and often thirty-six feet, in circumference, at six feet 
above the earth’s surface; and rises to the height of two 
hundred and thirty feet —one hundred and twenty of that 
height without a limb. One which was measured by a mem- 
ber of their party is said to have been forty-two feet in girth, 
at a height beyond the reach of an ordinary man, and was 
estimated to reach the altitude of three hundred feet!® This 
account, so far as respects the general height of the tree, has 
been amply confirmed by succeeding travelers, and especially 
by that enterprising botanist, the late Mr. Douglas, whose 
name the species bears, and to whom its discovery is generally 
attributed. Mr. Douglas was really the first to make known 
the Lambert Pine (Pinus Lambertiana) to the scientific 
world ; a species which grows on the southern frontiers of 
Oregon Territory and in northern California; the height of 
which is the more extraordinary, as the trees do not form a 
thick forest, but are rather sparsely scattered over the plains. 
1 « Arb. Brit.,” iv. p. 2881 f., 2196. 
2“ Porest Scenery,” i. p. 87.— The natural and economical history of 
this important tree has already been fully recorded on the pages of this 
Journal. Vol. xliv. p. 339, and vol. lviii. p. 300. 
8 «“ History of the Expedition of Lewis and Clarke,” ii. p. 155. — More 
surprising still, and, as to the height compared with the diameter of 
the trunk, to us nearly incredible, is their account of a fallen tree of the 
same species on Wappatoo Island, which, they state, “measured 318 feet 
in length, although its diameter was only three feet!” (Op. cit. ii. 
p. 225.) 
4 We have not found Lewis and Clarke’s account anywhere cited or 
alluded to, exeept by the accurate (former) editor of the “ American Al- 
manac,” in the volume for 1838, p. 108. 
