enty-five feet in diameter
are not very rare and a few are nearly three hundred feet high. In
the Calaveras grove there are four trees over 300 feet in height, the
tallest of which as measured by the Geological Survey is 325 feet. The
very largest that I have yet met in the course of my explorations is
a majestic old fire-scarred monument in the Kings River forest. It is
thirty-five feet and eight inches in diameter inside the bark, four
feet above the ground. It is burned half through, and I spent a day
in clearing away the charred surface with a sharp ax and counting the
annual wood-rings with the aid of a pocket lens. I succeeded in laying
bare a section all the way from the outside to the heart and counted a
little over four thousand rings, showing that this tree was in its prime
about twenty-seven feet in diameter at the beginning of the Christian
era. No other tree in the world, as far as I know, has looked down on so
many centuries as the sequoia or opens so many impressive and suggestive
views into history. Under the most favorable conditions these giants
probably live 5000 years or more though few of even the larger trees are
half as old. The age of one that was felled in Calaveras grove, for the
sake of having its stump for a dancing-floor, was about 1300 years, and
its diameter measured across the stump twenty-four feet inside the bark.
Another that was felled in the Kings River forest was about the same
size but nearly a thousand years older (2200 years), though not a very
old-looking tree.

So harmonious and finely balanced are even the mightiest of these
monarchs in all their proportions that there is never anything overgrown
or monstrous about them. Seeing them for the first time you are more
impressed with their beauty than their size, their grandeur being in
great part invisible; but sooner or later it becomes manifest to the
loving eye, stealing slowly on the senses like the grandeur of Niagara
or of the Yosemite Domes. When you approach them and walk around them
you begin to wonder at their colossal size and try to measure them. They
bulge considerably at the base, but not more than is required for beauty
and safety and the only reason that this bulging seems in some cases
excessive is that only a comparatively small section is seen in near
views. One that I measured in the Kings River forest was twenty-five
feet in diameter at the ground and ten feet in diameter 220 feet above
the ground showing the