DECIDUOUS TREES. 
305 
tively poor, were sadly valuable for ship-timber, and therefore 
sacrificed on the altars of profit and utility. Trees grown to great 
size in the forest cannot be preserved when their supporting trees 
are cut from around them, and we must therefore leave to future 
centuries to record to what size the trees now growing in open 
ground may eventually attain. The Wadsworth oak, near Gen¬ 
esee, N. Y., the valley-road oak of Orange, N. J., of which the 
above engraving is a portrait, and a few others scattered at rare 
intervals over the country, are trees of great size, large enough to 
show that age only is wanting to give them the colossal dimen¬ 
sions of trunk and branches that British oaks have attained, and, 
compared with which, our largest are mostly but moderate-sized 
trees. The Wadsworth oak probably comes nearer to the great 
English exemplars than any other, having a trunk thirty-six feet in 
circumference. The valley-road oak, just mentioned, has an unusually 
20 
THE VALLEY-ROAD OAK OF ORANGE, N. J. 
