this wonderful tree, largely through the efforts of
the Division of Forestry. In the official chronology of the United
States Geological Survey--which is no more nor less reliable than that
of other geological surveys, because all are alike mere approximations
to the truth--the Sequoia was a well developed race 10,000,000 of years
ago. It became one of a large family, including fourteen genera. The
master genus--the _Sequoia_--alone includes thirty extinct
species. It was distributed in past times through Canada, Alaska,
Greenland, British Columbia, across Siberia, and down into southern
Europe. The Ice Age, and perhaps competition with other trees more
successful in seeding down, are responsible for the fact that there are
now only two living species--the "red wood," or _Sequoia
sempervirens_, and the giant, or _Sequoia gigantea_. The last
refuge of the _gigantea_ is in ten isolated groves, in some of
which the tree is reproducing itself, while in others it has ceased to
reproduce.

In the year 1900 forty mills and logging companies were engaged in
destroying these trees.

All of us regard the destruction of the Parthenon by the Turks as a
great calamity; yet it would be possible, thanks to the laborious
studies which have chiefly emanated from Germany, for modern architects
to completely restore the Parthenon in its former grandeur; but it is
far beyond the power of all the naturalists of the world to restore one
of these Sequoias, which were large trees, over 100 feet in height,
spreading their leaves to the sun, before the Parthenon was even
conceived by the architects and sculptors of Greece.

LIFE OF THE SEQUOIA AND HISTORY OF THOUGHT.

In 1900 five hundred of the very large trees still remained, the highest
reaching from 320 to 325 feet. Their height, however, appeals to us less
than their extraordinary age, estimated by Hutchins at 3,600, or by John
Muir, who probably loves them more than any man living, at from 4,000 to
5,000 years. According to the actual count of Muir of 4,000 rings, by a
method which he has described to me, one of these trees was 1,000 years
old when Homer wrote the Iliad; 1,500 years of age when Aristotle was
foreshadowing his evolution theory and writing his history of animals;
2,000 years of age when Christ walked upon the earth; nearly 4,000 years
of age when the "Origin of Species" was written. Thus the life of one of
these trees spanned the whole period before the birth of Aristotl