14 THE TREES OP AMERICA. 



PLATE II. 



SEQUOIA GIGANTEA, TORREY; WELLINGTONIA GIGANTEA, LINDLET. 



(GIANT REDWOOD.) 



" Griant trees, 

 Children of elder time, in whose devotion, 

 The chainless winds still comfe, and ever come, 

 To drink their odors, and their mighty swinging 

 To hear — an -old and solemn harmony." ■;— Shii,let. 



Dr. Lindley says of this_ vegetable giant, whose age is estimated to be three 

 thousand years, " It .must have been a little plant vrhen Samson was slaying 

 his Philistines, or Paris running away with Helen." It is found in a single 

 district on the elevated slopes of the Sierra Nevada, near the head waters of the 

 Stanislaus and San Antonio Rivers^ — thirty-eight degrees north latitude, and 

 one hundred and twenty-nine degrees west longitude, — at an elevation of five 

 thousand feet above the level of the sea. Some eighty or ninety trees exist within 

 the circuit of a mile. The following are the dimensions of some of the largest 

 of them, from a source which we believe is worthy of credit : One, four hundred 

 feet in height, one hundred and nineteen feet in circumference ; a cluster of 

 three, three hundred feet in height, ninety-two in circumference; one, two 

 hundred feet in height, eighty-five feet in circumference ; one, three hundred 

 and twenty-five feet in height, ninety-one and a half feet m circumference ; two, 

 united at the base, three hundred feet in height, ninety-two feet in circumference ; 

 two, three hundred and twenty-five feet in height, ninety feet in circumference ; 

 one, three hundred feet in height, ninety-four feet in circumference ; one, three 

 hundred feet in height, seventy-two feet in circumference ; two, three hundred 

 feet in height, eighty-five feet in circumference. 



The tree from which our plate is made was two hundred and ninety feet in 



