THE FORESTS 185 



of year and you will say they are the most beauti 

 ful and majestic on earth. Beautiful and impressive 

 contrasts meet you everywhere : the colors of tree 

 and flower, rock and sky, light and shade, strength 

 and frailty, endurance and evanescence, tangles of 

 supple hazel-bushes, tree-pillars about as rigid as 

 granite domes, roses and violets, the smallest of their 

 kind, blooming around the feet of the giants, and 

 rugs of the lowly chanisebatia where the sunbeams 

 fall. Then in winter the trees themselves break 

 forth in bloom, myriads of small four-sided stami- 

 nate cones crowd the ends of the slender sprays, 

 coloring the whole tree, and when ripe dusting the 

 air and the ground with golden pollen. The fertile 

 cones are bright grass-green, measuring about two 

 inches in length by one and a half in thickness, 

 and are made up of about forty firm rhomboidal 

 scales densely packed, with from five to eight seeds 

 at the base of each. A single cone, therefore, con 

 tains from two to three hundred seeds, which are 

 about a fourth of an inch long by three sixteenths 

 wide, including a thin, flat margin that makes them 

 go glancing and wavering in their fall like a boy's 

 kite. The f ruitf ulness of Sequoia may be illustrated 

 by two specimen branches one and a half and two 

 inches in diameter on which I counted 480 cones. 

 No other Sierra conifer produces nearly so many 

 seeds. Millions are ripened annually by a single 

 tree, and in a fruitful year the product of one of the 

 northern groves would be enough to plant all the 

 mountain-ranges of the world. Nature takes care, 

 however, that not one seed in a million shall germi 

 nate at all, and of those that do perhaps not one 



