it
so that the movement shall be shown in a vessel of water nearly
seventy feet below the summit, and higher up the vibration is like
that of an earthquake. I have seen one of those wretched wooden
spires with which we very shabbily finish some of our stone
churches (thinking that the lidless blue eye of heaven cannot tell
the counterfeit we try to pass on it,) swinging like a reed, in a
wind, but one would hardly think of such a thing's happening in a
stone spire. Does the Bunker-Hill Monument bend in the blast like
a blade of grass? I suppose so.

You see, of course, that I am talking in a cheap way;--perhaps we
will have some philosophy by and by;--let me work out this thin
mechanical vein.--I have something more to say about trees. I have
brought down this slice of hemlock to show you. Tree blew down in
my woods (that were) in 1852. Twelve feet and a half round, fair
girth;--nine feet, where I got my section, higher up. This is a
wedge, going to the centre, of the general shape of a slice of
apple-pie in a large and not opulent family. Length, about
eighteen inches. I have studied the growth of this tree by its
rings, and it is curious. Three hundred and forty-two rings.
Started, therefore, about 1510. The thickness of the rings tells
the rate at which it grew. For five or six years the rate was
slow,--then rapid for twenty years. A little before the year 1550
it began to grow very slowly, and so continued for about seventy
years. In 1620 it took a new start and grew fast until 1714 then
for the most part slowly until 1786, when it started again and grew
pretty well and uniformly until within the last dozen years, when
it seems to have got on sluggishly.

Look here. Here are some human lives laid down against the periods
of its growth, to which they corresponded. This is Shakspeare's.
The tree was seven inches in diameter when he was born; ten inches
when he died. A little less than ten inches when Milton was born;
seventeen when he died. Then comes a long interval, and this
thread marks out Johnson's life, during which the tree increased
from twenty-two to twenty-nine inches in diameter. Here is the
span of Napoleon's career;--the tree doesn't seem to have minded
it.

I never saw the man yet who was not startled at looking on this
section. I have seen many wooden preachers,--never one like this.
How much more striking would be the calendar counted on the rings
of one of those awful trees