THE SEQUOIAS OR BIG TREES 53 



wood we find that these Yellowstone trees are scarcely to be dis- 

 tinguished from the Californian redwood and it seems a reasonable 

 inference that they represent its direct ancestor, particularly as 

 other petrified woods from western Canada are likewise closely 

 related to the redwood. The Miocene, like the Eocene and OHgo- 

 cene periods, was characterized to a large exent by vast continental 

 deposits laid down chiefly by streams, small lakes and wind action. 

 To the westward the Rocky mountains were rising and bringing 

 about the development of the great plains type of country. 



The volcanic eruptions, which first became a prominent feature 

 during the Cretaceous, culminated during the Miocene, as the 

 immense number of extinct cones in the western half of North 

 America give abundant evidence. The interval between the close 

 of the Miocene and the modem sequoias is imperfectly known. 

 CHmates were becoming cooler and the sequoias were on the wane, 

 although they are not at all uncommon even at this late time in 

 Germany and Holland. But few fossils are found and it is presumed 

 that the elevation of mountain ranges shutting off the vernal breezes 

 and the consequent alterations in humidity, as well as the vast changes 

 attendant upon the coming of the ice fields of the glacial period, 

 were sufficient to all but extinguished the noble sequoia family. 



At about the time the Neanderthal skull housed the brain of a 

 cave dweller who fashioned the paleolithic flints, and who dwelt 

 in the fear of the great hairy mammoth, the cave bear, the hyaena 

 and the wooly rhinoceros, or shortly thereafter, the present sequoias 

 reached their habitation in California. Could they but hand down 

 to us the record of history embraced in a generation or two, each 

 lasting between two and four thousand years, what a tale they 

 might unfold. Tradition has it that Napoleon encouraged his 

 soldiers before the battle of the pyramids with the picturesque 

 phrase 'forty centuries look down upon you,' and yet the span of 

 a single sequoia about equals what to the biblical chronologies of 

 Napoleon seemed the limit of time. Many of the still vigorous 

 and growing trees sprouted about the time that Christ was born 

 at Bethlehem in Judea. Most of those still standing had com- 

 menced to grow at least before the fall of Rome. We can count 



