IO4 ESSAY Ul'ON REDWOOD. 



below 36; altitude 5,000 to 8,000 feet rarely 8,400 

 feet broken by two gaps, each forty miles wide, caused 

 by manifest topographical and glacial reasons given one 

 between Calaveras and Tuolumne, the other between 

 Fresno and King's River. Thence the vast forest trends 

 south across the broad basins of Kaweah and Tule, a dis- 

 tance of seventy miles, on fresh moraine soil, ground from 

 high mountain-flanks by glaciers. These inscriptions for 

 we have often examined them, guided by Mr. J. Muir are 

 scarcely at all marred by post glacial agents ; and the con- 

 tiguous water-worn marks are often so slight in the rock- 

 bound streams as to be even measured by a few inches ! 



Rarely, very rarely, do these sound and vigorous ce- 

 dars fall, but if so they lie 800 to a 1,000 years, scarcely 

 less perishable than the granite on which they grew ! The 

 great Sequoian ditches dug at a blow by their fall, and the 

 tree tumuli always turned up beside the deep root-bowls 

 remain ; but not a vestige of one outside the present forests 

 has yet presented itself. Hence the area has not been di- 

 minished during the last eight or ten thousand years ! and 

 probably not at all in post-glacial times. The notion, 

 therefore, that this species tends towards extinction more 

 than others, or the planet itself, seems absurd ; for its vital 

 vigor is assured in ages past and present, and, so far as 

 mundane things can be, to come. 



These colossally sublime Sequoias rise 275, 300, or even 

 400 feet aloft ; are twenty, thirty, and in some rare cases 

 forty feet or more in diameter ! as vast columnar pillars 

 of the skies! No known trees of the world compare with 



