AGRICULTURAL BOTANY. 263 



a difference as wide as that from a loaf of bread made of pine sawdust to one made of wheat 

 flour. The difference in a soil that will yield pine-wood abundantly, but wheat and maize 

 very sparingly, is the proof of plant rotation. 



The volatile alkali ammonia which abounds in Peruvian guano works this change in piney 

 wood land for one or two crops, in a remarkable degree. Wood-ashes also produce signal 

 effects on such soils, being far more lasting than guano. Alkalies in some form appear to be 

 necessary to change a pine-growing soil into one adapted for the production of oaks, hickory, 

 and grain. Numerous facts similar in purport to those above stated are well known to every 

 observing farmer ; but the reason suggested by Professor Johnston and others, why pine-trees 

 succeed oak forests, and the latter, or beech, or other hard deciduous trees succeed pines, do 

 not appear entirely satisfactory. On the rich lands of the Western States and in Western 

 New York, where beech and maple or oak-bearing soils are left to grow up a second time in 

 forests, they do not, like the comparatively poor land of New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, 

 North and South Carolina, and Georgia, produce a crop of old field pines, but a second growth 

 of the trees of the primitive forests. Coniferous plants never supercede those of a higher 

 order and more complex development, where the latter can flourish. If pines drive out oaks 

 and poplars, it is because the latter find an uncongenial soil, made not so by nature, but by 

 the labors of man. Nature never rotates her vegetable productions from a higher to a lower 

 order of organism, if her developments are not molested. The deeply-descending tap-root of 

 the pine, its light wind-driven seed, and its abundant foliage, fit it, in an eminent degree, to 

 recuperate impoverished old fields, and prepare the surface of the ground to bear a crop of 

 oaks, corn, or cotton. The growth of pines does not, however, necessarily induce the growth 

 of oaks or beeches ; for there is no reason to suppose that the pine forests of North and South 

 Carolina and Georgia have not flourished on the same surface for twenty successive genera- 

 tions of trees. There is no evidence of a natural system of a rotation of plants from pine to 

 oak, and oak to pine, in Southern cultivation. Am. Cotton-Planter. 



The Sesquoia gigantea, or Great Tree of California. 



THE great tree of California, originally called by the English botanists Wellingtonia gi- 

 gantea, and supposed to be a new species, has been recently determined by Professor Gray, 

 of Cambridge, to belong to the family Sesquoia, and must hence be known as the Sesquoia 

 gigantea. It inhabits a solitary district in California on the elevated slopes of the Sierra 

 Nevada, near the head- waters of the Stanislaus and St. Antonio rivers, at an elevation of five 

 thousand feet above the level of the sea. From eighty to ninety trees exist, all within the 

 circuit of a mile, with a height varying from two hundred and fifty to three hundred and 

 twenty feet, and from ten to fifteen feet in diameter. Their manner of growth is much 

 like the Taxodium sempervirens : some are solitary, some are in pairs ; while some, and not 

 unfrequently, stand three and four together. A tree recently felled measured about three 

 hundred feet in length, with a diameter, including bark, of twenty-nine feet two inches at 

 five feet from the ground ; at eighteen feet from the ground it was fourteen feet six inches 

 through ; at one hundred feet from the ground, fourteen feet ; and at two hundred from the 

 ground, five feet five inches. The bark is of a pale cinnamon-brown, and from twelve to 

 fifteen inches in thickness. The ^ranchleta are round, somewhat pendant, resembling a 

 cypress or juniper. The leaves are pale grass-green. Those of the young trees are spread- 

 ing, with a sharp, accuminate point. The cones are about two and a half inches long and two 

 inches across at the thickest part. The trunk of the tree in question was perfectly solid 

 from the sap-wood to the centre ; and, judging from the number of concentric rings, its age 

 has been estimated at three thousand years. The wood is light, soft, and of a reddish color, 

 like redwood or Taxodium sempervirens. Of this vegetable monster, twenty-one feet of the 

 bark, from the lower part of the trunk, have been put in the natural form in San Francisco 

 for exhibition ; it there forms a spacious carpeted room, and contains a piano, with seats 

 for forty persons. Op one occasion, one hundred and forty children were admitted without 

 inconvenience. 



A piece of the wood, recently examined by Professor Gray, of Cambridge, was found to 



