When seeds of this giant tree were first brought to England by Mr. J. D. Matthew in 1853, we Britons named it _Wellingtonia_ in pious memory of the Iron Duke, who had breathed his last in the previous year, and that is still the name it goes by popularly with us. Americans, not less patriotically, called it _Washingtonia_; but we are now bidden by botanists to speak of it as _Sequoia_, a genus of conifers composed of only two species. _Sequoia gigantea_, then, is the mightiest of evergreens, for although the other species, the Redwood (_S. sempervirens_), may exceed it in stature, ranging to a height of 340 feet, it does not build up such an enormous trunk. The largest Redwood measured by Dr. Mayr in 1885 was 308 feet high, but not more than 46 feet in girth at 6½ feet from the ground. Its bole was clear of branches to a height of 230 feet. It may enable readers to realise these vast dimensions if they bear in mind that Messrs. Elwes and Henry have not found a tree of any kind in the British Isles 150 feet high, except the great black Italian poplar at Albury Park, and here and there a larch and spruce reaching to that stature. Sixty years' experience has proved to British planters that, given suitably generous soil and adequate shelter, the Wellingtonia can be grown in these islands as successfully as in its native district, to wit, the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada of California between the altitudes of 5,000 and 8,500 feet. Indeed, there is no reason to doubt that, in sheltered glens and river valleys, it is capable of attaining in the Old World dimensions as great as those it has reached in the New. Owing to the ease with which they can be raised from seed, Wellingtonias have been very widely distributed through British and Irish counties, and there are already many of 100 feet and upwards in height--an astonishing growth for less than half a century. Thus a Wellingtonia at Fonthill, which is known to have been raised from seed in 1861, was 102 feet high in 1906, with a girth of 17 feet, being then only 45 years old. This tree stands in a favourably sheltered hollow, and so does one of the tallest I have seen in this country, namely, one at Albury Park, which stands on the brink of the lucid Tillingbourne. This tree, planted in 1857, was 54 feet high in 1879, and 97 feet in 1913.