SCENERY. 83 
since its bark was stripped off, some of its branches are yet 
green. 
A section of bark and part of the wood of the felled tree 
are now in the English Crystal Palace. The rings of this tree 
were counted; and its age was variously estimated, according 
to the different methods of counting, at from nineteen hundred 
to three thousand years. Probably its age was about two 
thousand years. It sprouted while Rome was in her glory. 
It is older than any kingdom, language, or creed, of Europe 
or America. It was a large tree before the foundation of the 
Christian Church, and was fifteen hundred years old before 
the period of modern civilization began. Twenty centuries 
look down upon the tourist from the tops of the larger trees; 
and some of the little ones will still flourish for a thousand 
years from now, when all our present kingdoms and republics 
shall have disappeared, and our political and social systems 
shall have been swept away as full of evil, and replaced by 
other and better systems, under which men will live in civilized 
society without each being forced to rob his brother by means 
more or less legal and respectable. 
In many of the trees in all the groves, hollows are burned 
at the foot, and some of them have been burned so as to stand 
on three legs. One of these, in the Calaveras grove, called 
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” has an open space under it of more 
than a dozen feet square. The largest trees seem to end ab- 
ruptly at the top, having been broken off by the snow, which 
often falls to a great depth so high up on the Sierra Nevada. 
The trees, in some places, grow very near together; in others, 
’ they are comparatively far apart ; and occasionally two or three 
will be seen which are united at the ground, although they 
may have been twenty or thirty feet apart when they sprouted. 
It is said that the big-tree grove of Tulare county is eight 
miles long, and contains larger trees than either Calaveras or 
Mariposa, the largest measuring one hundred and twenty-three 
feet in circumference twelve feet above the ground. We have, 
Lowever, no detailed description of this grove. 
