110 ESSAYS. 
intention of going thither, he cheerfully set about accompany- 
ing me. At mid-day I reached my long-wished-for Pines, and 
lost no time in examining them, and endeavoring to collect 
specimens and seeds. New and strange things seldom fail to 
make strong impressions, and are therefore frequently over- 
rated; so that, lest I should never again see my friends in 
England to inform them verbally of this most beautiful and 
immensely grand tree, I shall here state the dimensions of 
the largest I could find among several that had been blown 
down by the wind. At three feet from the ground, its cir- 
cumference is fifty-seven feet nine inches; at one hundred 
and thirty-four feet, seventeen feet five inches; the extreme 
length two hundred and forty-five feet.1 The trunks are 
commonly straight, and the bark remarkably smooth for such 
large timber, of a whitish or light-brown color, and yielding 
a great quantity of bright amber gum. ‘The tallest stems are 
generally unbranched for two thirds of the height of the tree ; 
the branches rather pendulous, with cones hanging from their 
points, like sugar-loves in a grocer’s shop. These cones are, 
however, only seen on the loftiest trees, and the putting my- 
self in possession of three of these (all I could obtain) nearly 
brought my life to a close. As it was impessible either to 
climb the tree or hew it down, I endeavored to knock off the 
cones by firing at them with ball, when the report of my gun 
brought eight Indians, all of them painted with red earth, 
armed with bows, arrows, bone-tipped spears, and flint knives. 
They appeared anything but friendly. I endeavored to ex- 
plain to them what I wanted, and they seemed satisfied, and 
sat down to smoke; but presently I perceived one of them 
1 We take this to be the correct account. But, by an error in copying, 
as we suppose, the length of this same tree is given at only two hundred 
and fifteen feet, inthe memoir inserted in the 16th volume of the “ Trans- 
actions of the Linnzean Society ” ; whence it has been copied into Lambert’s 
great work on Pines, Loudon’s Arboretum, the “ American Almanaec”’ 
for 1838, and Hooker’s “Flora Boreali-Americana.’’ There is another 
apparent discrepancy between the two accounts. In the Linnean Trans- 
actions, the timber is said to be “ white, soft, and light.” In his journal, 
Douglas says, the wood of the large tree he examined was “ remarkably 
fine-grained and heavy.” 
