an area of three or four square miles, a short distance to the southward of the famous Mariposa Grove.  Along the beveled rim of the canon of the south fork of King’s River there is a majestic forest of Sequoia about six miles long by two wide.  This is the northernmost assemblage of Big Trees that may fairly be called a forest.  Descending the precipitous divide between the King’s River and Kaweah you enter the grand forests that form the main continuous portion of the belt.  Advancing southward the giants become more and more irrepressibly exuberant, heaving their massive crowns into the sky from every ridge and slope, and waving onward in graceful compliance with the complicated topography of the region.  The finest of the Kaweah section of the belt is on the broad ridge between Marble Creek and the middle fork, and extends from the granite headlands overlooking the hot plains to within a few miles of the cool glacial fountains of the summit peaks.  The extreme upper limit of the belt is reached between the middle and south forks of the Kaweah at an elevation of 8400 feet.  But the finest block of Big Tree forest in the entire belt is on the north fork of Tule River.  In the northern groves there are comparatively few young trees or saplings.  But here for every old, storm-stricken giant there are many in all the glory of prime vigor, and for each of these a crowd of eager, hopeful young trees and saplings growing heartily on moraines, rocky ledges, along watercourses, and in the moist alluvium of meadows, seemingly in hot pursuit of eternal life.

But though the area occupied by the species increases so much from north to south there is no marked increase in the size of the trees.  A height of 275 feet and a diameter near the ground of about 20 feet is perhaps about the average size of full-grown trees favorably situated; specimens 25 feet in diameter are not very rare, and a few are nearly 300 feet high.  In the Calaveras Grove there are four trees over 300 feet in height, the tallest of which by careful measurement is 325 feet.  The largest I have yet met in the course of my explorations is a majestic old scarred monument in the King’s River forest.  It is 35 feet 8 inches in diameter inside the bark four feet from the ground.  Under the most favorable conditions these giants probably live 5000 years or more, though few of even the larger trees are more than half as old.  I never saw a Big Tree that had died a natural death; barring accidents they seem to be immortal, being exempt from all the diseases that afflict and kill other trees.  Unless destroyed by man, they live on indefinitely until burned, smashed by lightning, or cast down by storms, or by the giving way of the ground on which they stand.  The age of one that was felled in the Calaveras Grove, for the sake of having its stump for a dancing-floor, was about 1300 years, and its diameter, measured across the stump, 24 feet inside the bark.  Another that was cut down in the King’s River forest was