In the spring of 1835, a considerable number of white pines were planted about my residence. Of these fifteen are still standing, and are apparently in full vigor. My uncle, who planted these pines, states that they were of very uniform size, their trunks measuring about two and a half inches in diameter. At present the smallest of the series measures forty-three inches in circumference, four feet from the ground, and the largest seventy-nine inches. Nine of them vary from sixty-two to sixty-eight inches. The average circumference of the fifteen trees is sixty-two and a half inches. These trees were not placed at uniform distances from each other, and some show the certain ill-effect of overcrowding. This is conspicuously the case with three of the pines, and these have suffered. Had the planting been done with greater reference to the future, and an equal chance given each tree, the average circumference would have been greater by at least three inches; the girth of the twelve largest being sixty-five inches. As it is, including the three somewhat stunted trees, the growth (circumferential measurement) has been sixty inches in fifty-four years; an annual increase of one and one ninth inches.[1] These pines stand upon a bluff, composed of compact ferruginous sand of great depth, and are exposed to the full sweep of the western and northern winds. In the matter of soil and exposure they have had equal chances. It is not readily seen, if at all determinable, why more of these trees should not have reached the maximum size, and become stately trees, which, in a sadly deforested landscape, are commanding objects. A year later two wild cherries were planted near the pines by the same person. “These trees were very small,” he writes me, “as I pulled them up with my hand and carried them to the yard, as one would a walking-stick. Probably neither was more than an inch in diameter.” These trees are in full vigor to-day, one measuring seventy-three inches and the other sixty-eight in circumference. The former is fully fifty feet in height, and the crop of fruit it bears annually is enormous. In 1836 my grandfather found among a lot of peach-trees that he had purchased an elm (_Ulmus Americana_) which “was a mere switch.” It was planted in an out-of-the-way corner, and is now a splendid tree, with a spread of branches measuring seventy feet. The circumferential measurement, at a height of four feet from the ground, is one hundred and three inches.