CONIFER^.. 



81 



we indebted for many of the apparently fabulous stories wbich have 

 been told and published about it. This world-renowned "Bark" is 

 now to be seen in the north transept of the Crystal Palace, where it is 

 neatly and very naturally arranged on a prepared skeleton frame ; and 

 the tree, called the Mother of the Forest," from which this bark was 

 peeled, we are told, though then dead, still stood more than three hundred 

 and fifty feet high, one hundred and forty feet to the first Kmb, ninety- 

 three feet the circumference at base, and forty-five feet circumference at 

 one hundred feet high ; be this as it may, however, the bark is about 

 eighteen inches thick, and clearly shows that the tree which produced 

 it must indeed have been a giant. Much has likewise been told us 

 about the age to which this fir will live and grow j but the only test 

 or proof of this that can be given is the concentric ring gro^vths, 

 which, as I have already stated, like most general rules, has its excep- 

 tions ; and this fir is one of those few kinds concerning which I am 

 quite satisfied that, a few tens of years hence, trees of it will be cut in 

 Eritain which, according to their concentric rings, will show an age 

 ]nuch greater than the date of its modern discovery; for although 

 generally true and correct as a rule for computing the age of most of 

 the firs and pines, yet, in this, and in the other species, Taxifolia, it is 

 the reverse. Mooty though its age be, there is little of the mystic 

 about its dimensions; for with such a cloud of witnesses, including 

 such men as Murray, Black, Grosvenor, Eenny, and others who 

 have visited the grove in Calaveras County, on the slopes of the 

 Sierra l^^evada, near the source of the San Antonia, about two hundred 

 and twenty-five miles from San Francisco, in Upper CaKfornia, where 

 there lately were from six to seven dozen of these trees, ranging in 

 heights from two hundred to four hundred and fifty feet, with trunk 

 diameters at base of from ten to thirty feet, we have proof enough to 

 establish the fact that it is, if not the giant of the vegetable kingdom, 

 at least the giant of the firs ; hence my name Gigantahies ; and as I 

 have dared to re-christen this big tree, I must needs give my reason for 

 so doing. Wellingtonia Gig ant ea is at best but The Gigantic 

 Wellington, and a lamentable misnomer for such a mammoth of a 

 tree, and a compliment servilely paid to so great and good a man as 

 the departed hero of Waterloo. That he was great the world knows, 

 and history is not likely to forget the fact ; but that he was a corporeal 

 giant I never fancied, though I never doubted that he was indeed a 

 mental one ; much less would one believe him to have been a tree ! 

 As, however, firs are matter, not mind, I treat of them in a material- 



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