The Big Tree and the Redwood 



trees are so scarce in the Big Tree groves. Only in the southern 

 range of this species do seedhng trees appear to reassure us that 

 the race will preserve itself, if only the three agencies of destruc- 

 tion, the axe, the saw and the forest fire, can be curbed. 



The tourist, hurrying through the Sequoia National Park, gets 

 very little but an awed sense of the magnificence of these trees. 

 It is worth while to have had the glimpse his limited ticket per- 

 mits. Big stories told by friends who had been there before, 

 actual dimensions of noted trees, and all the guide-book extrava- 

 gance of description, have not prepared him for the things he 

 sees. He is speechless with astonishment. He walks across an 

 ample platform which is the flat top of a Sequoia stump. He 

 sleeps, perchance, in a house which is a hollow log. He rides in a 

 coach and four through a tunnel over which a standing trunk 

 arches, like a mighty occidental Colossus of Rhodes. He lifts a 

 fragment of bark, and it is 2 feet thick. It took three long weeks 

 of steady labour for two men to cut down one tree ! 



The living trees are green topped, but bare of limbs for two- 

 thirds of their great fluted trunks. Our tallest Eastern oak, with 

 the tallest sycamore or walnut atop of it, would not equal the 

 height of one of these giants. Spruces and pines of majestic port 

 standing around look like saplings. They are dwarfed by the 

 company they keep. They look up, but the Sequoias look not 

 down but out, indifferent to all that is transpiring below them. 

 They see only the limitless reaches of the eternal sky; their meat 

 and drink, the sunshine and the leaf mould; their breath of life, 

 the unwearying winds of heaven. 



There were great forests of Sequoias once in central and 

 northern Europe and in mid-continental North America. They 

 stretched away, even to the Arctic circle. This was just before 

 the great climatic Reconstruction Period, when magnolias flour- 

 ished in Greenland and all the plants and animals of the tem- 

 perate zone found congenial habitation in near proximity to the 

 North Pole. Then came the Age of Ice, and only those species 

 survived which were able to keep ahead of the glaciers, and estab- 

 lish themselves in regions not overwhelmed by the ice. The rocks 

 of the Tertiary Period preserve the story of these times, and in the 

 pages opened by the geologist's hammer, five distinct species of 

 Sequoia are recorded. "Pressed specimens" indeed, these fossil 

 trees are, two of which are identical with the California trees. 



88 



