DECIDUOUS TREES. 



305 



THE VALLEY-ROAD OAK OK ORANGE, 



tively poor, were sadly valuable for ship-timber, and therefore 

 sacrificed on the altars of profit and utility. Trees grown to great 

 size in the forest cannot be preserved when their supporting trees 

 are cut from around them, and we must therefore leave to future 

 centuries to record to what size the trees now growing in open 

 ground may eventually attain. The Wadsworth oak, near Gen- 

 esee, N. Y., the valley-road oak of Orange, N. J., of which the 

 above engraving is a portrait, and a few others scattered at rare 

 intervals over the country, are trees of great size, large enough to 

 show that age only is wanting to give them the colossal dimen- 

 sions of trunk and branches that British oaks have attained, and, 

 compared with which, our largest are mostly but moderate-sized 

 trees. The Wadsworth oak probably comes nearer to the great 

 English exemplars than any other, having a trunk thirty-six feet in 

 circumference. The valley-road oak, just mentioned, has an unusually ' 



20 



