330 AMERICAN FOREST-TREES. 
sition én si¢u of hornblendic gneiss with layers and veins of 
quartz, “and which did not exist before the felling of the 
forest twenty years previous,” he describes as more than 55 feet 
in depth, 800 yards in length, and from 20 to 180 feet in 
breadth. Our author refers to other cases in the same States, 
“ where the cutting down of the trees, which had prevented the 
rain from collecting into torrents and running off in sudden 
land-floods, has given rise to ravines from 70 to 80 feet deep.” * 
Similar results often follow in the North-eastern States from 
cutting the timber on the “ pine plains,” where the soil is usually 
of a sandy composition and loose texture. 
American Forest-Trees. 
The remaining forests of the Northern States and of Canada 
no longer boast the mighty pines which almost rivalled the 
gigantic sequoia and redwood of California; and the growth 
of the larger forest-trees is so slow, after they have attained to 
a certain size, that if every pine and oak were spared for two 
centuries, the largest now standing would not reach the stature 
of hundreds recorded to have been cut within two or three 
generations. Dr. Williams, who wrote about sixty years ago, 
* LYELL, Principles of Geology, 10th ed., vol. i., 345-6. 
+ The growth of the white pine, on a good soil and in open ground, is 
rather rapid until it reaches the diameter of a couple of feet, after which it 
is much slower. The favorite habitat of this tree is light, sandy earth. On 
this soil, and in a dense wood, it requires a century to attain the diameter of 
a yard. Emerson (7vees of Massachusetts, p. 65), says that a pine of this 
species, near Paris, ‘‘ thirty years planted, is eighty feet high, with a diameter 
of three feet.” He also states that ten white pines planted at Cambridge, 
Massachusetts, in 1809 or 1810, exhibited, in the winter of 1841 and 1842, an 
average of twenty inches diameter at the ground, the two largest measuring, 
at the height of three feet, four feet eight inches in circumference ; and he 
mentions another pine growing in a rocky swamp, which, at the age of thirty- 
two years, ‘‘gave seven feet in circumference at the but, with a height of 
sixty-two feet six inches.” This latter I suppose to be a seedling, the others 
transplanted trees, which might have been some years old when placed where 
they finally grew. 
The following case came under my own observation: In 1824 a pine-tree, 
