CHAPTER VII 



The Sequoias or Big Trees 



"A living thing, 



Produced too slowly ever to decay, 

 Of form and aspect too magnificent 

 To be destroyed." 



— Wordsworth. 



It is most fitting to commence these sketches of tree ancestors 

 with an account of the sequoia which has the most ancient Kneage 

 of any of the trees described in the following pages. In the days 

 when the world was considered to be only about six thousand years 

 old and when the few known fossils were thought to be the visible 

 evidence of Noah's flood, as was first suggested by Martin Luther, 

 it was scarcely remarkable that no one was interested in tree 

 ancestors. In fact there were no such things as ancestors for an 

 anthropomorphic deity had supplied them ready miade for the 

 Garden of Eden, and each had produced according to its kind 

 from that dehghtful time with only this by no means trifhng and 

 wholly unexplained exception that there had been no weeds or 

 harmful trees until Adam's fall at wliich time all nature fell and 

 the forest trees which formerly had all produced delightful fruits 

 changed their nature and now yielded worthless or poisonous fruits, 

 thistles and all the hosts of agricultural pests were born and man 

 has since been born to trouble as the sparks fly upward — the words 

 are those of Job. 



In modern days with the passing of most of the virgin forests of 

 the temperate zones, and the great interest in preserving some of 

 our threatened trees such as the sequoia, black walnut, long leaf 

 and white pine, from total extermination, it is a matter of surprise 

 that the thought that these noble races of plants had ancestors 

 and a partly known genealogy is but rarely entertained. 



Tree genealogies it is true present little of the dramatic as com- 

 pared with the wonderful evolutionary tree of the elephants, horses 



