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PATTERSON v. M'CAUSLAND. 89
for differences in soil and situation, let it be presumed, that in all
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 chesnut tree of
France, of thirty feet in circumference, must have been nine hun-
dred and sixty years old; and thus it would seem, that the tradi-
tion and conjectures, as to its age, were nearly correct. Accord-
ing to the same mode of calculation, the great sycamore, (platanus
occidentalis,) 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. (w)
But a much larger sycamore has been described by Pliny, as being
then, in the first century of the Christian era, alive and standing in
Syria, whose trunk, hollowed by time, afforded a retreat, for the
night, to the Roman consul Lycinius 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 (x) This great sycamore must have been then, according
to this mode of calculation, more than two thousand years old. (y)
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(w) 1 Mich. Am. Sylva, 325.—-(x) 1 Mich. Am. Sylva, 325.
(y) ' 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 con-
tents 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 cylin-
drical, more than forty-five feet in circumference. There is said to be an oriental
sycamore, growing near Constantinople, one hundred and fifty feet in circumfer-
ence, 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 hundred. De Candolle estimates the age of a Mexican
cypress at six thousand years; but then his estimate was formed by dividing the
semi-diameter of the trunk, by the average thickness of the layers of that species of
tree, and for reasons before mentioned, cannot be relied upon. If it were Indeed so
old, its young shoot most have been watered by the waves of the deluge. The
12 v. 3
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