xxxi] WASHINGTON TO SAN FRANCISCO 159 



which grew in a soil of stiff, hard-baked clay. We wound 

 about among the hills and valleys, all perfectly dry, till we 

 reached a height of fifteen hundred feet, where many clumps 

 of young redwoods were seen, and, stopping at one of these, 

 Dr. Gibbons took me inside a circle of young trees from 

 twenty to thirty feet high, and showed me that they all grew 

 on the outer edge of the huge charred trunk of an old tree 

 that had been burnt down. This stump was thirty-four feet 

 in diameter, or quite as large as the very largest of the more 

 celebrated Big Trees, the Sequoia gigantea. The doctor has 

 searched all over these hills, and this was the largest stump 

 he had found, though there were numbers between twenty 

 and thirty feet. The tree derives its botanical name, semper- 

 virens, from the peculiar habit of producing young trees 

 from the burnt or decayed roots of the old trees. These 

 enormous trees, being too large to cut down, were burnt till 

 sufficiently weakened to fall, and this particular tree had been 

 so burnt about forty years before. We lunched inside this 

 ancient mammoth tree, and saw several others on the way 

 back. Among the few plants I saw in flower were the 

 Diplacus glutinosus, a favourite in our greenhouses. 



The next day we went to Stockton, where my brother 

 lived, and found his wife, whom I had last seen as a little 

 girl, two of his sons and his only daughter, as well as two of 

 his grandchildren. I gave one lecture in Stockton — a com- 

 bination of Darwinism and Oceanic Islands — but only had 

 a small audience. I made the acquaintance here of Mr. 

 Freeman, a friend of my brother, who had called on me at 

 Godalming with his wife two or three years before, on their 

 way round the world on a pleasure tour. He told me then 

 that he had had good luck in his business, had made a few 

 thousand dollars, his only daughter was just married, so he 

 thought that he and his wife might as well see the world. 

 On asking him how he had made the money, he said, " By 

 handling mules," and this enigmatic profession was ex- 

 plained as buying them in some of the Western States, where 

 they are largely bred, and selling them in Nevada, where 

 there was a great demand for them at the mines, etc. Now 



