844 The Age of Forest Trees. [September, 
health and formed normal rings for about one hundred and forty 
years, when another mishap caused small rings till within the last 
fifty years, when it was putting on fair growths again. This tree 
was about one and a half miles south-east of Rockville, Indiana, 
and was noted among hunters and woodmen. It was a disagree- 
able showery day when I examined it, and for that reason I did 
not examine its top to see if dead and lost and healed-over limbs 
coincided with the small rings, but I have often done so in other 
cases, and found them to coincide. 
Last May (1884) I examined a sycamore and water elm in the 
Wabash river bottom, the former six feet in diameter and the lat- 
ter five, each one hundred and eighty years old. They stood 
about one hundred and fifty feet apart. They were stand- 
ing on the upper end of a newly made bottom (I mean new as 
compared with the higher and older bottoms a little more inland 
from the river, say two hundred years old). This was the largest 
sycamore I ever saw that was sound to the heart. I have seen 
hollow ones nearly eight feet in diameter. This tree seems never 
to have met with any mishap till the log man came along, as the 
rings of growth were all unusually large. 3 
These trees very probably sprouted twelve to fifteen feet below 
the present surface of the bottom. They generally begin life on 
the lower end of river sandbars, and as sedimentation builds up 
the surface, they put out new surface roots at every two to three 
feet of elevation. Such trees with their several sets of surface 
roots, are often seen in drift piles, and also still standing on 
the verge of a steep river bank where one side is exposed by the 
erosion of the river. Their roots are often hollow like their 
trunks, the hollow (and root too) decreasing in diameter down- 
ward till it terminates in a point, like a cone standing on its 
point. In the south-west corner of this county is a hollow cot- 
tonwood stump on what is now a high bottom of the Wabash, in 
which the hollow extends downward twelve feet. Mr. Joseph J. 
Daniels, an intelligent, observing man, on whose land it stands, 
told meso. Such silting up over the surface roots would kill 
= most of the upland trees, or those that grow from the seed on the 
high bottoms. | 
