est in Michigan.

Yet New England pines have matched it, and more. Writing in 1846,
Emerson tells of trees here 250 feet in height and six feet in
diameter. One in Lancaster, New Hampshire, measured 264 feet.
Fifty years before that trees in Blandford measured when they were
felled 223 feet in length. The upper waters of the Penobscot were
long the home of mighty pine trees where it was no uncommon thing
to hew masts 70 to 90 feet in length. In 1841 one was hewed there
90 feet in length, 36 inches in diameter at the butt and 28 inches
at the top. Such trees have passed, now, almost from the memory of
living man. Could we have them here in our State they would be
worshipped as were the druidical trees of ancient European
countries and the place of their standing would be made a park
that they might be visited by all, rich or poor. It seems a pity
that our ancestors could not have thought of this. It would have
been so easy for them to let clumps of these wonderful old pines
stand, here and there. It is so impossible for us to bring one of
them back, with all our wealth and all our learning.

If we may believe the geologists the pines were the original tree
inhabitants of our land, massing it in their dark green from
mountain top to sea shore. Suddenly no one knows whence, the oaks
and other deciduous trees appeared among them and in part drove
them out of the richer soils. "The oak," says Gray, "has driven
the pine to the sands." Yet the pines grow equally well among the
rough rocks of mountain slopes where the winter gales that wreck
the hardwood trees leave them untouched. This is the more strange
as pines rarely root deeply. The roots, even of old trees seventy
to one hundred feet in height, rarely go into the earth more than
two or three feet, taper rapidly and extend not usually over
twenty feet on every side. In young trees twenty or twenty-five
feet tall the roots do not penetrate more than fifteen or eighteen
inches, yet great old trees stand alone in pasture and on hilltop,
exposed to all the fury of the fiercest gales, rarely if ever
blown down. The structure of yielding limbs that swing so that the
gusts glance on their plumes, and the needle-like leaves that let
the torrents of air slip through them, is no doubt the reason for
this. The outermost pines of the grove shoulder the gale away from
the others, yet let it slip by themselves, giving it no grip
whereby to tear them up. The resinous roots of the tre