In measuring trees, it is so easy to exaggerate by running your line around the roots rather than the real body, that I place little dependence on the reported and recorded measurements of parties under no obligations to preserve a judicial impartiality. But I believe a fair measurement of the largest trees standing in this grove would make them not less than one hundred feet in circumference, and over thirty in diameter, at a height of six feet from their respective bases, and that several of them have an altitude of more than three hundred feet. I believe the one that was last uprooted measures a little over three hundred.

But these relics of a more bounteous and magnificent world seem destined to speedy extinction. I deem them generally enfeebled by age and the racking and wrenching of their roots by the blasts that sweep through their tops. These malign influences they might withstand for ages, however, were it not for the damage they have already sustained, and are in danger hereafter of sustaining, through the devastating agency of fire. Far these glorious evergreen forests, though the ground beneath them is but thinly covered with inflammable matter, are yet subject to be overrun every second or third year by fire. For the earth, to a depth of several feet, even, is dry as an ash-heap, from July to October, and the hills are so steep that fire ascends them with wonderful facility. And thus the Big Trees are scarred, and gouged, and hollowed out at the root and upward, as the effects of successive fires, one of which, originating far southward, ran through this locality so late as last Autumn, burning one of the forest kings so that it has since fallen, half destroying another already prostrate - through the hollow of which two horsemen (not G. P. R. James's, I trust,) were accustomed to ride abreast for a distance of fully one hundred feet - and doing serious damage to very many others.

If the village of Mariposa, the County, or the State of California, does not immediately provide for the safety of these trees, I shall deeply deplore their infatuation, and believe that these giants might have been more happily located.

The Big Trees are usually accounted Redwood, but have strong resemblance to the Cedar family, so that my intelligent guide plausibly insisted that they are identical in species with their probable contemporaries, the famous Cedars of Lebanon. The larger Cedars in their vicinity bear a decided resemblance to the smallest of them; and yet there are quite obvious differences between them. The Cedar's limbs are by far the more numerous, and come far down the trunk; they are also relatively smaller. The Cedar's bark is the more deeply creased up and down the trunk, while the foliage of the Big Trees is nearer allied to that of certain Pines than to the Cedar's. The bark of the Big Trees is very thick - in some instances, over two feet - and is of a dry, light quality, resembling cork: hence the fatal facility of damage by running fires. The wood of the Big Trees is of a light red color, seeming devoid alike of sap and rosin, and to burn about as freely while the tree lives as a year or more after its death.

Unless in the Cedars of Lebanon, I suspect these mammoths of the vegetable world have no counterparts out of California.

They are of course not all of extraordinary size, yet I cannot remember one that would girth so little as twenty feet at a height of two yards from the earth's surface, which is the proper point for horizontal measurement. Hardly one is entirely free from the marks of fire at its root, while several have been burned at least half through, and are so hollowed by fire that a tree eight feet in diameter would probably find ample room in its cavity. And, while many are still hale and thrifty, I did not perceive a single young one coming forward to take the place of the decaying patriarchs. I believe these trees now bear no seed-cone or nut, whatever they may have done in Scipios or in Alexander's time, and that there is no known means of propagating their kind; and I deeply regret that there is not, - though starting a tree that would come to its maturity in not less than four thousand years would seem rather slow business to the fast age in which it is our fortune to live. Possibly, the Big Trees are a relic of some bygone world - some past geologic period - contemporaries of the gigantic, luxuriant ferns whereof our Mineral Coal is the residuum.

I am sure they will bo more prized and treasured a thousand years hence than now, should they, by extreme care and caution, be preserve so long, and that thousands will then visit them, over smooth and spacious roads, for every one who now toils over the rugged bridle-path by which I reached them. Meantime, it is a comfort to know that the Vandals who bored down with pump-augers the largest of the Calaveras trees, in order to make their fortunes by exhibiting a section of its bark at the East, have been heavy losers by their villainous speculation.