j 26 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



one in limited numbers in a few choice spots on the Sierra Nevada, the 

 other only along the Coast Range from the bay of Monterey to the 

 frontiers of Oregon ? Are they veritable Melchisedeks, without pedi- 

 gree or early relationship, and possibly fated to be without descent ? 

 Or are they now coming upon the stage (or rather were they coming 

 but for man's interference) to play a part in the future ? Or are they 

 remnants, sole and scanty survivors of a race that has played a grander 

 part in the past, but is now verging to extinction ? Have they had a 

 career, and can that career be ascertained or surmised, so that we may 

 at least guess whence they came and how and when ? Time was, and 

 not long ago, when such questions as these were regarded as useless 

 and vain when students of natural history, unmindful of what the 

 name denotes, were content with a knowledge of things as they now 

 are, but gave little heed as to how they came to be so. Now such 

 questions are held to be legitimate, and perhaps not wholly unanswer- 

 able. It cannot now be said that these trees inhabit their present re- 

 stricted areas simply because they are there placed in the climate and 

 soil of all the world most congenial to them. These must indeed be 

 congenial, or they would not survive. But when we see how Austra- 

 lian eucalyptus trees thrive upon the California coast, and how these 

 very redwoods flourish upon another continent ; how the so-called wild- 

 oat {Avena sterilis of the Old World) has taken full possession of Cali- 

 fornia ; how that cattle and horses, introduced by the Spaniard, have 

 spread as widely and made themselves as much at home on the plains 

 of the La Plata as on those of Tartary, and that the cardoon thistle- 

 seeds, and others they brought with them, have multiplied there into 

 numbers probably much exceeding those extant in their native land ; 

 indeed, when we contemplate our own race, and our own particular 

 stock, taking such recent but dominating possession of this New 

 "World ; when we consider how the indigenous flora of islands gen- 

 erally succumbs to the foreigners which come in the train of man ; and 

 that most weeds (i. e., the prepotent plants in open soil) of all tem- 

 perate climates are not " to the manor born," but are self-invited in- 

 truders, we must needs abandon the notion of any primordial and ab- 

 solute adaptation of plants and animals to their habitat which may 

 stand in lieu of explanation, and so preclude our inquiring any further. 

 The harmony of Nature and its admirable perfection need not be re- 

 garded as inflexible and changeless. Nor need Nature be likened to a 

 statue, or a cast in rigid bronze, but rather to an organism, with play 

 and adaptability of parts, and life and even soul informing the whole. 

 Under the former view, Nature would be " the faultless monster which 

 the world ne'er saw," but inscrutable as the Sphinx, whom it was 

 vain, or worse, to question of the whence and whither. Under the 

 other, the perfection of Nature, if relative, is multifarious and ever re- 

 newed ; and much that is enigmatical now may find explanation in 

 some record of the past. 



