90 CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. [Proc. 3D Ser. 



number which are several decades old. They, and other 

 smaller young trees of various ages, have come from the 

 stump and roots of a much older tree which must have been 

 very large when it was felled. The old stump has been 

 repeatedly burned under and into, apparently by camp fires, 

 but the heat could not have been enough to do more than 

 local damage, and even this is not great. There is little 

 left of the old stump above the general ground level, but as 

 the hillside falls away abruptly at that point, a good deal of 

 the underground part of the old tree is more or less exposed. 

 Because of the irregularity of the surface of the hillside 

 just there, the old tree sent its roots out more irregularly 

 than is usually the case and the trees which have sprung up 

 from them are not symmetrically placed. There is a 

 thicket, but not a circle or " temple," of redwoods. All of 

 these second growth trees are perfectly normal, as far as I 

 could see. One buttress of the old parent tree, instead of 

 sending up a few more or less scattered sprouts which grow 

 up fairly rapidly and, within a season or two take on the 

 characters of young trees in bark, foliage, and manner of 

 branching, produces branches or bunches of scrubby, 

 thickly set, short and slender sprouts or suckers. These 

 are perfectly white as to leaves. The youngest parts of the 

 stems are of the same ghostly color as the leaves. These 

 white suckers may attain a height of thirty (30) centimeters 

 in the course of one season. They began growing early in 

 April this spring (1900), and they go on growing till hard 

 frost comes. In the same length of time, and with a simi- 

 lar origin, a green sprout or sucker would make two or 

 three or more times this growth in length. The white 

 suckers increase in thickness proportionally to their growth 

 in length, that is, slowly, but the surface of the stem be- 

 comes brown and develops cork sooner than the correspond- 

 ing parts of the green suckers. This precocious cork-for- 

 mation is not accompanied by other means of protection or 

 by such vigor that the white suckers survive the hard frosts 

 of winter. Even this last winter, milder than usual, was 

 fatal to the white suckers ; they were killed down to or just 



