472 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY . 



saber-toothed tigers, the sequoias are found from Tasmania to Iceland 

 and Spitzbergen, and from Ireland to Japan. Their remains are 

 everywhere — in France, Italy, Greece, Bohemia, Greenland, America — 

 they had even found their way down along the South American coast 

 as far as Chili. 



In the Yellowstone region whole forests have been changed to stone 

 by the mineral waters, or buried in the showers of ashes from the active 

 volcanoes in the vicinity. The remains of the trunks are still from 

 six to ten feet in diameter, and the erect butts are often thirty feet 

 or more in height, standing just as they grew, a veritable Aladdin's 

 forest turned to stone. From a microscopic study of the wood we find 

 that these Yellowstone trees are scarcely to be distinguished from the 

 Californian redwood and it seems a reasonable inference that they rep- 

 resent its direct ancestor, particularly as other petrified woods from 

 western Canada are likewise closely related to the redwood. The 

 Miocene, like the Eocene and Oligocene periods, was characterized to 

 a large extent by vast continental fresh-water deposits laid down 

 chiefly by streams, small lakes and drifting sand. To the westward 

 ran a low range of hills, the embryonic Eocky Mountains, where the 

 ancient crystalline strata were slowly pushing their way upward through 

 the overlying Mesozoic and Tertiary rocks. Around the water courses 

 grew swamp maples and alders, gum trees and mulberries; figs still 

 flourished in the latitude of Puget Sound; saber-toothed tigers hunted 

 the hornless rhinoceroses; and the primitive mastodons with four 

 tusks, two in each jaw, vied with the great horned rhinoceroses for pos- 

 session of the soil. 



The volcanic eruptions, which first became a prominent feature 

 during the Cretaceous, culminated during the Miocene, as the immense 

 number of extinct cones in the western half of North America give 

 abundant evidence. The interval between the close of the Miocene 

 and the modern sequoias is imperfectly known. Climates were becom- 

 ing cooler and the sequoias were on the wane. But few fossils are 

 found and it is presumed that the elevation of mountain ranges, shut- 

 ting off the vernal breezes, and the consequent alterations in humidity, 

 as well as the vast changes attendant upon the coming of the ice fields 

 of the glacial period, were sufficient to all but extinguish the noble 

 sequoia family. 



At about the time the Neanderthal skull housed the brain of a cave 

 dweller who fashioned the paleolithic flints, and who dwelt in the fear 

 of the great hairy mammoth, the cave bear, the hyena and the wooly 

 rhinoceros, or shortly thereafter, the sequoias reached their present 

 habitation in California. Could they but hand down to us the record 

 of history embraced in a generation or two, each lasting between two 



