E.EMAKKABLE FOREST TREES. 173 



each, to measure thus rudely its circumference at the 

 stump. The only way it could be felled, was by boring 

 repeatedly with pump augers. It required five men, 

 twenty-two days, to perform the operation. After they 

 had succeeded in severing it at the stump, the shoulders 

 were so broad, and the tree so perfectly equipoised, that it 

 took the same five men two days in driving wedges with 

 a battering-ram, on one side of the cut, to throw it out of 

 its equilibrium sufficiently to make it fall. The mere fell- 

 ing of the tree, at California prices for wages, cost the sum 

 of $550. 



" A short distance from this tree was another of larger 

 dimensions, which, apparently, had been overthrown by 

 accident, some forty or fifty years ago. It was hollow for 

 some distance ; and, when I was there, quite a rivulet was 

 running through its cavity. The trunk was three hundred 

 feet in length ; the top broken ofi^, and by some agency 

 (probably fire), was destroyed. At the distance of three 

 hundred feet from the butt, the trunk was forty feet in 

 circumference, or more than twelve feet in diameter. 

 Fragments of the same kind of "tree, which had apparently 

 been exposed to the vicissitudes of climate and the weather 

 the same length of time, and supposed to be from the indi- 

 vidual tree that lies prostrate, are to be found projected 

 in a line with the main body, one hundred and fifty feet 

 from the top ; proving to a degree of moral certainty, that 

 the tree, when standing alive, must have attained the 

 height of four hundred and fifty or five hundred feet ! At 

 the butt it is one hundred and ten feet in circumference, 

 or about thirty-six feet in diameter. 



" These mammoth trees, by their stately and majestic 

 bearing, striking the beholder with awe and wonder, and 

 cause him almost involuntarily to bow before them as the 

 kings of the forest. Their whole number does not exceed 

 five hundred, and all are comprised within an area of about 

 fifty acres. Only eighty or ninety of them are of gigantic 

 size. Their extremely limited locality and number, forcibly 

 impress the traveller with the belief that the species will 



