When it stood erect in its live
wrappings, it measured forty feet in diameter,--over one hundred and
twenty in circumference! Estimates, grounded on the well-known principle
of yearly cortical increase, indisputably throw back the birth of these
largest giants as far as 1200 B. C. Thus their tender saplings
were running up just as the gates of Troy were tumbling down, and some
of them had fulfilled the lifetime of the late Hartford Charter-Oak when
Solomon called his master-masons to refreshment from the building of the
Temple. We cannot realize time-images as we can those of space by a
reference to dimensions within experience, so that the age of these
marvellous trees still remains to me an incomprehensible fact, though
with my mind's eye I continue to see how mountain-massy they look, and
how dwarfed is the man who leans against them. We lingered among them
half a day, the artists making color-studies of the most picturesque,
the rest of us _izing_ away at something scientific,--Botany,
Entomology, or Statistics. In Geology and Mineralogy there is nothing to
do here or in the Valley,--the formation all being typical Sierra-Nevada
granite, with no specimens to keep or problems to solve. Of course our
artists neither made nor expected to make anything like a realizing
picture of the groves.
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