Chaney • Redwoods Around the Pacific Basin 



205 



miles northeast of Chungking, in Sze- 

 chuan Province. Earher botanists who 

 had visited this part of China all ap- 

 pear to have traveled along the north 

 side of the Yangtse River, and there is 

 no record that anyone other than the 

 villagers had ever seen what caught 

 Wang's eye on the edge of Mo-tao-chi. 

 Here in the midst of the rice paddies 

 rose an enormous tree, with leaves and 

 cones unlike those of any tree previ- 

 ously observed. 



The second major event came 

 about when Wang showed the speci- 

 mens he had collected to Professor 

 Wan-Chun Cheng of National Cen- 

 tral University, and to Dr. Hsen-Hsu 

 Hu of Fan ' Memorial Institute of 

 Biology. Neither of these authorities 

 on the trees of central China had ever 

 heard of a tree with leaves and cones 

 such as these. To them it was wholly 

 new to the living flora of China and 

 the rest of the world. But— and this is 

 the remarkable part of their great con- 

 tribution to science— they remembered 

 that they had seen leaves and cones of 

 the same sort on fossil specimens; the 

 specimens from the great tree from 

 Mo-tao-chi were an exact match for the 

 fossils which Miki had named Meta- 

 sequoia. Fortunately they had read his 

 paper in 1946, long before it reached 

 the United States. They knew that the 

 tree discovered by forester Wang was 

 a Metasequoia. 



The third event came about after 

 Dr. Hu had written to me and to others 

 in the United States regarding this re- 

 markable discovery of a living redwood 

 which had previously been known only 

 as a fossil. Dr. E. D. Merrill, of the 

 Arnold Arboretum of Harvard Univer- 

 sity, had sent funds for additional field 

 work bv the Chinese in central China; 

 in 1947 trees of Metasequoia had been 

 found growing at several other local- 

 ities, and manv more specimens, in- 

 cluding seeds, had been collected. Now, 

 with some of these seeds on the table 



before me, I realized that a remark- 

 able opportunity was presenting itself 

 to see a forest of long ago, a forest 

 whose principal member had been 

 thought to be extinct for millions of 

 years. In January of 1948, within a few 

 minutes of my first view of these seeds, 

 I was making active plans to visit cen- 

 tral China. Dr. Milton Silverman, 

 Science Writer for the San Francisco 

 Chronicle, decided to go with me. 



Six weeks later, after a flight to 

 Chungking, a journey down the Yang- 

 tse to Wan Hsien, and a three-day trip 

 inland over the rocky trails of Sze- 

 chuan, there came the fourth and cul- 

 minating event. We stood beneath the 

 great tree growing on the eastern border 

 of Mo-tao-chi, our hands upon its gray, 

 red-flecked bark, our eyes uplifted to 

 branches which rose neady a hundred 

 feet above. Here was a fossil come to 

 life, a giant whose kind had persisted 

 out of the past to tell us the ston' of 

 the earth millions of years before man 

 came to live upon it. 



Re-examining the large collections 

 of fossil redwoods in our collections at 

 the University of California, the Cali- 

 fornia Academy of Sciences, and the 

 United States National Museum in 

 Washington, I had come to the con- 

 clusion that most of the specimens we 

 have been calling Sequoia, not only in 

 North America but in Asia as well, are 

 actually Metasequoia. It had been a 

 case of mistaken identity. In my study 

 of the forests of the past, I had recog- 

 nized abundant fossils which I believed 

 were the ancestors of Sequoia; now I 

 found they were in many ways unlike it, 

 and were identical with Metasequoia, 

 the dawn redwood of China. Clcady 

 some revisions were in order. 



When I stood beside the huge tree 

 at Mo-tao-chi, at the end of our third 

 day of travel on foot across the valleys 

 and mountain ranges of S/cchuan I 

 realized that its surroundings were not 

 suited to a study of its original environ- 



