Conservation of Natural Resources in California. 31 



LAST OF THE BIG TREES. 



Extracts from a notable article in Collier's Weekly under the above title 

 by Arthur Ruhl. Doubtless a good deal of this will seem merely senti- 

 mental to a hard-headed business man who deals in trees and lumber. 

 Nevertheless, it is well to remember that the mightiest things are started 

 by sentiments. Every great movement that has affected the destinies 

 of mankind had its beginning in a mere sentiment that somehow found 

 lodgment in some one's heart. The wise man harkens carefully to the 

 drift of sentiment. 



They rise up two hundred, two hundred and fifty, three hundred feet 

 sometimes, the trunks bare of branches for seventy-five or a hundred 

 feet, fluted, gray-brown columns like pillars of stone. Far overhead, 

 the delicate tracery of their foliage weaves a roof which shuts out the 

 direct sunlight and gives to everything below the soft twilight radiance 

 of a cathedral. Like a Gothic cathedral, indeed, is the natural aisle 



Good-bye to the redwood monarch. It is on the way to the mill. 



with the fluted, columnar trunks rising side by side toward the moun- 

 tain background, the mellowed light filtering through the arching roof 

 far above. 



Even the curious fluted trunks and the color a cinnamon turned 

 stone-gray by age and weather seems exotic and to belong to an older 

 age, when strange and monstrous animals roamed the forests. And 

 well they may look so, for they and more especially their near rela- 

 tives, the giant Sequoias of the Sierras are the oldest living things in 

 our world. The latter have conquered fire and snow and the other 

 enemies that have attacked them through the centuries, and stood there, 

 lofty and silent and serene, while wars have raged and been forgotten 

 and religions grown up and fallen into decay. The redwoods proper, as 

 these trees in the Bohemian grove are called, are not quite so ancient, 

 but they were mighty trees, at any rate, before the Roman Empire fell, 

 and they and their brothers may still be standing when the solitary 

 New Zealander looks upon the ruins of St. Paul's those at least which 

 haven't been cut up into fenceposts and shingles. 



