334 
SCENES IN THE PACIFIC. 
iled from human kind—and cast off from the sight of woman 
wife and child,—and deprived of the deep pulsations of joy 
which cluster around the holy altar of home, that old Saxon 
citadel of the virtues, I would pray for a cave in these 
heights and among these streamy vales. 
The timber trees on this part of the southern slope, as far 
northward as 40°, are worthy of notice. The white pine is 
very abundant and of a large growth. Several kinds of oak are 
also plentiful, the most common of which is the encina blanca , 
white oak. Its average height is forty feet—its trunk six or 
eight feet in girth, with a profusion of branches, which grow * 
together with the compactness of a hedge, and in perfect 
symmetry of form, like the rounded tops of an apple orchard. 
The live oak —quercus virens —is very abundant, and grows 
only on the highlands. Its diameter is usually from three to 
four feet; its altitude sixty or seventy. This timber is equal 
to any of the kind in the world in solidity, strength and dura¬ 
bility. 
But the noblest specimen of this tree found in the territory 
of the Sacramento, is the white oak proper, the quercus nava- 
lis. It grows on the river banks and the low hills of the prai¬ 
ries. A fine tree it is; not only on account of its excellent 
qualities as timber ; but for its lordly trunk, which one might 
almost say preserved an uniform diameter, its whole length. 
And the actual fact is, that it not unfrequently attains a girth 
of fifteen feet, at ten or fifteen feet from the root, and the 
branches possess corresponding dimensions, and extend a 
prodigious distance horizontally from the stem.* 
• Kelly 
