SEQUOIA AND ITS HISTORY. 147 
least in the commonly visited groves Sequoia gigantea is in- 
vested in its last stronghold, can neither advance into more 
exposed positions above, nor fall back into drier and barer 
ground below, nor hold‘its own in the long-run where it is, 
under present conditions; and a little further drying of the 
climate, which must once have been much moister than now, 
would precipitate its doom. Whatever the individual lon- 
gevity, certain if not speedy is the decline of a race in which 
a high death-rate afflicts the young. Seedlings of the big 
trees occur not rarely, indeed, but in meagre proportion to 
those of associated trees ; and small indeed is the chance that 
any of these will attain to “the days of the years of their 
fathers.” ‘Few and evil” are the days of all the forest 
likely to be, while man, both barbarian and civilized, torments 
them with fires, fatal at once to seedlings, and at length to 
the aged also. The forests of California, proud as the State 
may be of them, are already too scanty and insufficient for 
her uses. Two lines, such as may be drawn with one sweep 
of a brush over the map, would cover them all. The coast 
Redwood — the most important tree in California, although a 
million times more numerous than its relative of the Sierra — 
is too good to live long. Such is its value for lumber and its 
accessibility, that, judging the future by the past, it is not 
likely, in its primeval growth, to outlast its rarer fellow- 
species. 
Happily man preserves and disseminates as well as destroys. 
The species will doubtless be preserved to science, and for 
ornamental and other uses, in its own and other lands; and 
the more remarkable individuals of the present day are likely 
to be sedulously cared for, all the more so as they become 
scarce. 
Our third question remains to be answered: Have these 
famous Sequoias played in former times and upon a larger 
stage a more imposing part, of which the present is but the 
epilogue? We cannot gaze high up the huge and venerable 
trunks, which one crosses the continent to behold, without 
wishing that these patriarchs of the grove were able, like the 
long-lived antediluvians of Scripture, to hand down to us, 
