THE VITALITY OF THE SEQUOIA GIGANTEA * 

 By WILLIAM RUSSEL DUDLEY 



EXISTING along the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada range in Cali- 

 fornia, in isolated groves from Placer County to Tulare, Sequoia 

 gigantea is a relict of another age and time. In these trees we have- 

 with the Sequoia sempervirens, the redwood of the Coast Ranges the 

 remnants of a great genus that once spread over all the Northern hemi- 

 sphere, as evidenced by fossil specimens of a considerable number of species 

 found from France and Hungary to Spitzbergen, and from Greenland to 

 Oregon and Nebraska. These fossils are found from the Cretaceous, through 

 the Tertiary, down to recent times. How the species have disappeared and 

 the individuals of the Big Trees have shrunken to the few thousands perched 

 among the high salubrious valleys of our Sierra, cannot be easily answered. 

 The unknown complex of causes which brought about the great ice age, 

 brought Sequoia as a race near to extinction; and conditions surrounding life 

 were so profoundly changed, that their former distribution could never be 

 again restored. Whatever the cause of the present restriction of this species, 

 its comparative rarity, its inaccessibility, its great size, its majesty and the 

 beauty if its coloring have all served to enhance the interest which we all 

 feel in the California Big Tree. 



Indeed it is so noble, that it has been the subject of a considerable 

 amount of exaggeration and mistaken comment. The statements that its 

 age reaches 4,000 to 6,000 years, and its height exceeds 400 feet do not seem 

 to be based on any actual observation. Nevertheless it is crowned with 

 many titles to greatness, and the most remarkable of all is its relative ap- 

 proach to immortality. The evidence that all living things are finite is 

 so overwhelming that the mind is chastened with the thought of it. But 

 the life of a single great tree of Sequoia gigantea, when known clearly, stirs 

 the imagination again to thoughts of what might be attained, if disease 

 and the crushing weight of physical injury, as factors controlling life, 

 could be eliminated. Certainly the oldest of the Big Trees, such as we 

 see in the Calaveras groves and the forests of the Kings and Kaweah rivers, 

 have the distinction of being the oldest, the longest enduring upon the face 

 of the earth, of any living organism ; and this is largely because of their 

 freedom from disease and inherited weakness and, as I propose to show a 

 little later, from their marvelous recuperative power in the face of injury. 



* Read by invitation before the California Alumni Association of Columbia 

 University, January, 1905. 



