162 FOREST CULTURE AND 
of which, as far as the writer is aware, rise in their 
favorite haunts at the Sierra Nevada to about four 
hundred and fifty feet. Still, one of the mammoth 
trees measured, it is said, at an estimated height of 
three hundred feet, eighteen feet in diameter! Thus 
to Victorian trees for elevation the palm must appa- 
rently. be conceded. A standard of comparison we: 
possess in the spire of the Munster of Strasbourg, the 
highest of any cathedral of the globe, which sends 
its lofty pinnacle to the height of four hundred and 
forty-six feet, or in the great pyramid of Cheops, 
four hundred and eighty feet high, which, if raised 
in our ranges, would be overshadowed probably by 
Eucalyptus-trees. 
The enormous height attained by not isolated, but 
vast masses of our timber-trees in the rich diluvial 
deposits of sheltered depressions within Victorian 
ranges, finds its principal explanation, perhaps, in the 
circumstance that the richness of the soil is combined 
with humid geniality of the climate, never sinking 
to the colder temperature of Tasmania, nor rising to 
a warmth less favorable to the strong development of 
these trees in New South Wales, nor ever reduced to 
that comparative dryness of air which even to some 
extent, in the mountain-ravines of South Australia, is 
experienced. The absence of living gigantic forms of 
animal life amidst these the hugest forms of the vege- 
table world is all the more striking. 
Statistics of actual measurement of trees compiled 
in various parts of the globe would be replete with 
deep interest, not merely to science, but disclose also, 
in copious instances, magnitudes of resources but lit- 
tle understood up to the present day. Not merely, 
