e (384
B.C.) and after the death of Darwin (A.D. 1882), the two greatest
natural philosophers who have lived.

These trees are the noblest living things upon earth. I can imagine that
the American people are approaching a stage of general intelligence and
enlightened love of nature in which they will look back upon the
destruction of the Sequoia as a blot on the national escutcheon.

VENERATION OF AGE.

The veneration of age sentiment which should, and I believe actually
does, appeal to the American people when clearly presented to them even
more strongly than the commercial sentiment, is roused in equal strength
by an intelligent appreciation of the race longevity of the larger
animals which our ancestors found here in profusion, and of which but a
comparatively small number still survive. To the unthinking man a bison,
a wapiti, a deer, a pronghorn antelope, is a matter of hide and meat; to
the real nature lover, the true sportsman, the scientific student, each
of these types is a subject of intense admiration. From the mechanical
standpoint they represent an architecture more elaborate than that of
Westminster Abbey, and a history beside which human history is as of
yesterday.

SLOW EVOLUTION OF MODERN MAMMALS.

These animals were not made in a day, nor in a thousand years, nor in a
million years. As said the first Greek philosopher, Empedocles, who 560
B.C. adumbrated the "survival of the fittest" theory of Darwin, they are
the result of ceaseless trials of nature. While the Sequoia was first
emerging from the Carboniferous, or Coal Period, the reptile-like
ancestors of these mammals, covered with scales and of egg-laying
habits, were crawling about and giving not the most remote prophecy of
their potential transformation through 10,000,000 of years into the
superb fauna of the northern hemisphere.

The descendants of these reptiles were transformed into mammals. If we
had had the opportunity of studying the early mammals of the Rocky
Mountain region with a full appreciation of the possibilities of
evolution, we should have perceived that they were essentially of the
same stock and ancestral to our modern types. There were little camels
scarcely more than twelve inches high, little taller than cotton-tail
rabbits and smaller than the jackass rabbits; horses 15 inches high,
scarcely larger than, and very similar in build to, the little English
coursing hound known as the whippet; it is not improbable that we