40 THE PINE-TREE, OR 



In Doctor Dwight's Travels we have an account of a tree in 

 Lancaster, New Hampshire, which measured two hundred and 

 sixty-four feet in length. " Fifty years ago, several trees grow- 

 ing on rather dry land in Blandford, measured, after they were 

 felled, more than thirteen rods and a half, or two hundred and 

 twenty-three feet in length." 



I have worked in the forests among this timber several years, 

 have cut many hundreds of trees, and seen many thousands, but 

 have never found one larger than the one I felled on a little 

 stream which emptied into Jackson Lake, near the head of Bas- 

 kahegan stream, in the eastern part of Maine. This was a 

 " Pumpkin" Pine ; its trunk was as straight and handsomely 

 grown as a molded candle, and measured six feet in diameter 

 four feet from the ground, without the aid of spur roots. It was 

 about nine rods in length, or one hundred and forty-four feet, 



iEtna have been often cited as the giants of the vegetable kingdom. But 

 these sovereigns are dethroned, and put into the second rank by those lately 

 discovered in Tasmania, which leave far behind them those antique monu- 

 ments of nature. Last week I went to see the two largest trees existing in 

 the world. Both of them are on the border of a small stream tributary to 

 the river of Northwest Bay, in the rear of Mount Wellington. They are of 

 the species named there Swamp Gum ; I and my companions (five of us) 

 measured them. One of them had fallen ; we therefore easily obtained its 

 dimensions. We found its body two hundred and twenty feet from the 

 ground to the first branch. The top had broken off and partly decayed, but 

 we ascertained the entire height of the tree to have been certainly three 

 hundred feet. We found the diameter of the base of it to be thirty feet, and 

 at the first branch twelve feet. Its weight we estimated to be four hundred 

 and forty tons. The other tree, now growing without the least sign of de- 

 cay, resembles an immense tower rising among the humble Sassafras-trees, 

 although very large in fact. The Gum-tree at three feet above the ground 

 measured one hundred and two feet in circumference. In the space of a 

 square mile, I think there were not less than one hundred of these trees, 

 none less than forty feet in circumference. It must require several thousand 

 years to produce the largest one." — Revue Horticole. 



