842 The Age of Forest Trees. [September, 
the dirt all cast out on one side, and the corpse had got away and 
the grave remained unfilled. This tree had increased six times 
its diameter, and more than thirty-six (and counting the increased 
length nearly seventy-two) times its solid contents since the gov- 
ernment surveyors had marked it. 
The next year I made a survey in the rough hills of Sugar 
creek in the north-east part of the county, and in identifying a 
land corner I had occasion to examine another ash described in the 
field notes as three inches in diameter also. It stood on the point 
of a sandstone ridge, between three large white oaks, which 
formed a triangle around it, and were about fifteen feet apart. 
This ash, the same species as the one before described, had not 
grown to exceed one-half inch in the increase of its diameter in 
the fifty or fifty-one years since it had been marked. This would 
allow only one-fourth of an inch on each side; yet I counted 
under a magnifier, in this small space, the required number of 
rings of growth, They were thinner than common book paper, 
as they were at the rate of two hundred to the inch. This tree 
had increased only thirty-six per cent in fifty years, while the 
former had increased about seven thousand per cent in the same 
time. Why this difference in the size of these two ash trees? 
The reasons are plain. The former had a good soil on level 
ground, and the tornado had destroyed all the adult trees that 
would rob it of sunshine, rain and soil nourishment. The latter 
stood in dissolved sandstone for soil, on the top of a narrow ridge 
between three large oaks, which robbed it of sunlight and rain, 
and nearly all the soil nourishment. It had but five or six small 
branches for a top, and but few leaves to the branch, Under 
such conditions it did well to even exist. But to do this it was 
obliged to add a ring each year. 
- Eleven years ago I examined the stumps of two white oaks and 
the grave of a third, which told this singular story by circum- 
stantial evidence so strong that it could not be doubted. In the — 
year 1502 an acorn fell about one and a half miles from where 
I am now writing (Rockville, Indiana), and by favorable chance 
sprouted and grew into an oak. In 1594 another acorn sprouted 
about twenty feet distant from it. It may “have grown on the 
tree before mentioned, as it was then ninety-two years old. In 1731 
a tornado from the north-west blew down a still older oak, which 
its fall struck against and greatly damaged the top of the one 
