62 



LETTERS ON TREES. 



from them to shew that trees may attain to an age 

 altogether wonderful, and to a size that is quite prodi- 

 gious, ayid still continue to live and grow. 



13. But you may very naturally remark, that, after 

 all, as common observation demonstrates, the indi- 

 vidual instances of trees of such extraordinary growth 

 and longevity are comparatively — indeed, actually- 

 very few ; and that, if the representation I have given 

 of the nature and constitution of trees were well- 

 founded, they should be very numerous. Nay, you 

 may ask how it comes, that we nowhere find what we 

 might expect to see everywhere, Oaks, Elms, Firs, 

 and others of our famiUar forest-trees, evincing by 

 their size and by their appearance generally, that 

 they are coeval with the creation of man — coeval at 

 least with the Deluge, or the age immediately suc- 

 ceeding that catastrophe ? 



14. Allowing freely that none such exist anywhere 

 on the earth's surface, unless, indeed, we may except 

 the Boahah, the Draccena, and the Taxodium, said 

 to be severally from 4000 to 6000 years old, — and 

 readily admitting that trees of any kind much exceed- 

 ing even a few centuries are extremely rare, the 

 answer to these questions is not far to seek. All 



be seen, among the curiosities of the show, in a moderate-sized 

 flower-pot, a specimen of the Wellingtonia gigantia — "the parent 

 tree of which, we are told, was 300 feet high, thirty feet in diameter, 

 and supposed to be 3000 years old." — The Times Newspaper, June 

 4, 1855. 



