474 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



in an attempt to picture the exquisite beauty of that virgin forest, 

 standing age after age in all its unsullied glory — a veritable forest 

 primeval. 



Some of the Californian trees were still in their youth and others 

 were approaching middle age when the various hordes of barbarians 

 overran Europe. They had almost reached their full growth at the 

 time of the Wars of the Roses and the discovery of America. They 

 had reached their present height and girth and ripe old age before 

 modern science had commenced its renaissance; in fact, every avenue 

 of human endeavor — social, religious, industrial and intellectual — has 

 shown its most marvelous progress during the time that it has taken 

 the sequoias to add but a few feet to their already giant frames. In 

 the topmost space of Fig. 4 the growth of an existing sequoia through 

 the centuries is illustrated by an imaginary series of sections of the 

 trunk, drawn to scale, showing the comparative diameter of the trunk 

 at the time when the corresponding notable historical events occurred. 



We can but wonder at the persistence of this type practically un- 

 changed, for eon after eon, while all around were dissolution and evolu- 

 tion. Their early contemporaries are almost without exception cut off, 

 and were we to go still further back to the probable ancestors of the 

 sequoias, the Voltzias of the earlier ages, we could carry the genealogy 

 back several million more years, almost to the coal period. 



And yet the vicissitudes of time have not succeeded in wholly ob- 

 literating these ancient records preserved in the great book of history 

 whose torn pages are the solid rock, and we are able to decipher a line 

 here and a broken chapter there, gradually piecing together the main 

 facts of the story, the reading of which becomes not only a labor of 

 love, but a task of the most absorbing interest. 



