ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY 

 BULLETIN 



Published by the New York Zoological Society 



VOLUME XXII 



SEPTEMBER 1919 



NUMBER 5 



SAVING THE REDWOODS 



By MADISON GRANT 



AN ACCOUNT OF THE MOVEMENT DURING 1919 TO PRESERVE THE REDWOODS 



OF CALIFORNIA 



WHILE the cause of conservation of game 

 and forest in the United States has ad- 

 vanced with a rapidity and with a de- 

 gree of public support that could not have been 

 anticipated by the early conservationists, never- 

 theless it has been too slow to keep pace with 

 the forces of destruction. Members of the Zoo- 

 logical Society know only too well that the ever- 

 increasing stringency of game protective meas- 

 ures has failed to save many species of bur wild 

 life outside of national parks and other sanc- 

 tuaries,, and that in them alone the game will 

 find its final refuge. 



The forests are now threatened with annihila- 

 tion. It is officially stated that at the present 

 rate of destruction the old stand of forests in 

 the United States will all be cut over within 

 the next sixty years. It will not last sixty years 

 because the new and efficient methods of logging 

 by machinery now generally introduced are not 

 only more rapid, but make a clean sweep of ev- 

 ery standing stick, while the old method left be- 

 hind many of the smaller trees as well as a few 

 giants which were defective and not worth cut- 

 ting. 



The most serious threat of devastation, cer- 

 tainly the most dramatic, is the impending de- 

 struction of the giant Redwoods of the California 

 coast, and the following pages are devoted to 

 a description of the efforts being made to save 

 them. 



History of the Sequoia. 



The genus Sequoia, to which the two surviv- 

 ing species of the great trees of California be- 

 long, is a member of the Taxodiaceae and stands 

 widely separated from other living trees. This 

 genus together with closely related groups once 



spread over the entire northern hemisphere, and 

 fossil remains of Sequoia and kindred genera 

 have been found in Europe, Spitzbergen, Sibe- 

 ria, Alaska, Canada and Greenland. Changes in 

 climate and other causes have led to their grad- 

 ual extinction until the sole survivors of the 

 genus are confined to California, one to high 

 altitudes in the Sierra Mountains, and the other 

 to the western slope of the Coast Range. Fos- 

 sil leaves and cones of genera closely related to 

 Sequoia occur in the rocks of the Jurassic and of 

 the Trias, and the members of the genus Sequoia 

 were common and characteristic trees in Cali- 

 fornia throughout the Cretaceous. 



To give some idea of what this bald statement 

 means, these trees, virtually in their present 

 form, flourished in California before the mam- 

 mals developed from their humble, insectivorous 

 ancestors of the Mesozoic and while the dino- 

 saurs were the most advanced form of land ani- 

 mals. The mountains upon which these trees 

 now stand contain fossil records of early Se- 

 quoia-like trees, proving that this group abound- 

 ed before the rocks that constitute the pres- 

 ent Sierras and Coast Ranges were laid down in 

 the shallow seas, to be upheaved later and erod- 

 ed into their present shapes. In the base of 

 Mt. Shasta and under its lava flows, the ancient 

 rocks are marked with imprints of their leaves 

 and cones. Such antiquity is to be measured not 

 by hundreds or thousands, but by millions of 

 years. 



While the duration of the family, of the 

 genus, and even the existing species, or species 

 so closely allied as to be almost indistinguish- 

 able, extends through such an immense portion 

 of the earth's history, the life of the living trees 

 is correspondingly great. 



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