374 
AMERICAN FOREST TREES. 
American Forest Trees. 
The remaining forests of the Northern States and of Can¬ 
ada no longer boast the mighty pines which almost rivalled the 
gigantic Sequoia of California; and the growth of the larger 
forest trees is so slow, after they have attained to a certain 
size, that if every pine and oak were spared for two centuries, 
the largest now standing would not reach the stature of hun¬ 
dreds recorded to have been cut within two or three genera¬ 
tions.* Dr. Williams, who wrote about sixty years ago, states 
the following as the dimensions of “ such trees as are esteemed 
large ones of their kind in that part of America ” [Yermont], 
qualifying his account with the remark that his measurements 
t£ do not denote the greatest which nature bas produced of 
* The growth of the white pine, on a good soil and in open ground, is 
rather rapid until it reaches the diameter of a couple of feet, after which it 
is much slower. The favorite habitat of this tree is light sandy earth. On 
this soil, and in a dense wood, it requires a century to attain the diameter 
of a yard. Emerson (Trees of Massachusetts, p. 65), says that a pine of this 
species, near Paris, “ thirty years planted, is eighty feet high, with a diameter 
of three feet.” He also states that ten white pines planted at Cambridge, 
Massachusetts, in 1809 or 1810, exhibited, in the winter of 1841 and 1842, 
an average of twenty inches diameter at the ground, the two largest 
measuring, at the height of three feet, four feet eight inches in circumfer¬ 
ence ; and he mentions another pine growing in a rocky swamp, which, 
at the age of thirty-two years, “ gave seven feet in circumference at the 
but, with a height of sixty-two feet six inches.” This latter I suppose to 
be a seedling, the others transplanted trees, which might have been some 
years old when placed where they finally grew. 
The following case came under my own observation: In 1824, a pine 
tree, so small that a young lady, with the help of a lad, took it up from 
the ground and carried it a quarter of a mile, was planted near a house 
in a town in Vermont. It was occasionally watered, but received no 
other special treatment. I measured this tree in 1860, and found it, at 
four feet from the ground, and entirely above the spread of the roots, two 
feet and four inches in diameter. It could not have been more than three 
inches through when transplanted, and must have increased its diameter 
twenty-five inches in thirty-six years. 
