PATTERSON v. M'CAUSLAND.—3 BLAND. 73

layers of wood in an oak of no more than two hundred years of
age, were so much thinner than those of its youth, as to be scarcely
distinguishable; and that other kinds of trees, known to be of
rapid growth in early life, have been found, by actual measure-
ment, after they had attained a considerable age, to have remained
nearly of the same circumference during the lapse of twenty years.
1 Mich. Am. Sylva. 324. Therefore, after allowing * for dif-
ferenees in soil and situation, let it be presumed, that in all 89
trees, growing in their proper climates, of three hundred years of
age and upwards, each one of their concentrical layers has, during
their whole lives, on an average, annually added one-sixteenth
part of an inch to their diameters. Then according to such a mode
of calculation, the before mentioned great chestnut tree of Fiance
of thirty feet in circumference, must have been nine hundred and
sixty years old; and thus it would seem, that the tradition and
conjectures, as to its age. were nearly correct. According to
the same mode of calculation, the great sycamore, (platanus oc-
cidentalis,) on the right bank of the Ohio, above Marietta, which
was found, in the year 1802, to be at least fifteen feet in diameter,
must have been then fourteen hundred and forty-years of age. 1
Mich. Am. Sylva. 325. But a much larger sycamore has been de-
scribed by Pliny, as being then, in the first century of the Chris-
tian era, alive and standing in Syria, whose trunk, hollowed by
time, afforded a retreat, for the night, to the Roman Consul Ly-
cinius Mutianus, with eighteen of his retinue. The interior of this
grotto was seventy-five feet in circumference, and the summit of
the tree resembled a small forest. 1 Mich. Am. Sylra, 325. This
great sycamore must have been then, according to this mode of
calculation, more than two thousand years old. (g)

(g) "Some instances of great size and extreme longevity in exogenous
trees, where the statement can be relied upon, may not be uninteresting.
The pinus lambertiana, a species of pine indigenous to northern California,
probably attains a greater size than any other known tree. One specimen
measured by Mr. Douglas, an English botanist, was two hundred and fifteen
feet in height, fifty-seven feet nine inches in circumference, at a distance of
three feet from the ground, and seventeen feet five inches at one hundred
and thirty-four feet; thus giving as the solid contents of the trunk alone,
about twelve hundred cubic feet. This was probably the largest single mass
of timber ever measured by man. A sycamore growing near Marietta, Ohio,
measures fifteen feet six inches in diameter: or, supposing it cylindrical,
more than forty-five feet in circumference. There is said to be an oriental
sycamore, growing near Constantinople, one hundred and fifty feet in cir-
cumference, with an internal cavity of eighty feet. The largest oak, known
in England, was called Damony's Oak, in Dorsetshire, and was sixty-eight
feet in circumference. With respect to the age of trees, it may be remarked,
that an elm has been known to reach the age of three hundred and thirty-
five years; an ivy four hundred and fifty; an orange six hundred and thirty;
an olive about seven hundred; a cedar of Lebanon eight hundred; a white
oak one thousand and eighty; and a yew between thirteen and fourteen nun-