O04 VARIETY OF TREES IN AMERICA, 
sometimes, as we are assured, even to three hundred and sixty 
and four hundred feet, and she has also pines and cedars of 
scarcely inferior dimensions. The public being now convinced 
of the importance of preserving these colossal trees, it is very 
probable that the fear of their total destruction may prove 
groundless, and we may still hope that some of them may 
survive even till that distant future when the skill of the forester 
shall have raised from their seeds a progeny as lofty and as 
majestic as those which now exist.* 
European and American Trees compared. 
The woods of North America are strikingly distinguished 
from those of Europe by the vastly greater variety of species 
they contain. According to Clavé, there are in “France and 
in most parts of Europe only about twenty forest-trees, five 
or six of which are spike-leaved and resinous, the remainder 
broad-leaved.” + Our author, however, doubtless means genera, 
though he uses the word especes. Rossmissler enumerates fifty- 
seven species of forest-trees as found in Germany, but some of 
these are mere shrubs, some are fruit and properly garden 
trees, and some others are only varieties of familiar species. 
The valuable manual of Parade describes about the same num- 
ber, including, however, two of American origin—the locust, 
Robinia pseudacacia, and the Weymouth or white pine, Pinus 
strobus—and the cedar of Lebanon from Asia, which, or at 
least a very closely allied species, is indigenous in Algeria 
also. We may then safely say that Europe does not possess 
* California must surrender to Australia the glory of possessing the tallest 
trees. According to Dr. Mueller, Director of the Government Botanic Gar- 
den at Melbourne, a Hucalyptus, near Healesville, measured 480 feet in height, 
Later accounts speak of trees of the same species fully 500 feet in height. 
See ScHLEIDEN, Piir Baum und Wald, p. 21. 
If we may credit late reports, the growth of the eucalyptus is so rapid in 
California, that the child is perhaps now born who will see the tallest sequoia 
overtopped by this new vegetable emigrant from Australia. 
+ Etudes Forestiéres, p. 7. 
