Note 312 — Chapter VI · [263]

Padilla saw entire pieces of cedar among the ruins, ninety feet long and four in diameter. Some of the massive portals, he observed, were made of a single stone. (Hist. de Santiago, lib. 11, cap. 81.) Peter Martyr notices an enormous wooden beam, used in the construction of the palaces of Tezcuco, which was one hundred and twenty feet long by eight feet in diameter! The accounts of this and similar huge pieces of timber were so astonishing, he adds, that he could not have received them except on the most unexceptionable testimony. De Orbe Novo, dec. 5, cap. 10.{*}

{*} [Those who have seen the giant Sequoias of California can easily believe in those “enormous wooden beams.” The “Grizzly Giant,” still standing in the Mariposa grove, is two hundred and seventy-five feet high and considerably more than thirty feet in diameter at the ground. Eleven feet from the ground it is more than sixty-four feet in circumference. The Sequoias were not discovered until almost ten years after Prescott wrote this note.—M.]