22 FOREST TREES OF CALIFORNIA. 



Mr. J. Muir) scarce at all marred by postglacial agents, and 

 the contiguous water-worn marks are often so slight in the 

 rock-bound streams as to be measured by a few inches. 

 Rarely does one of these sound and vigorous cedars fall, and 

 if so, lie eight hundred to a thousand years, scarcely less 

 perishable than the granite on which it 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 lias yet 

 presented itself, hence the area has not been diminished 

 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 collossally sublime Sequoias rise two hun- 

 dred and seventy-five, three hundred, and even four hun- 

 dred feet aloft, are twenty to thirty, and in some rare cases, 

 forty feet in diameter, like vast columnar pillars of the skies. 

 No known trees of the world compare with them and their 

 kin, the Redwoods, for the focused proximity of such a mar- 

 velous amount of timber within limited areas; as it were, 

 the ne plus ultra standard of timber land capacity. Nor is 

 language alone adequate to impress upon us any due realiz- 

 ing sense of such vast tree magnitude without comparative 

 and associated statements, as if this were the all important 

 idea, and truly the utilitarian is a good foundation, indeed 

 enormous factor of some import; thus, the stage-coach 

 passes through one; one hundred and twenty children and 

 a piano crowd inside another; house for cotillion parties to 

 dance "stout on stumps;" horse and rider travel afar within 

 burnt out hollows of others, and so on, with variations. A 

 single tree would furnish two-rail fencing twenty to thirty 

 miles, etc. 



Having often visited these groves, a word may be allowed 

 relative to their sylvan claims, apart from lumber and cord- 

 wood contemplations. Familiar as we all are with their 

 ready growth into sturdy conic juvenile trees, with exceed- 

 ing broad swoop of base, we pass to these of columnarly 

 towering and spiry-topped youth of a few hundred years or 

 so; then, at length, we behold face to face the Great Wash- 

 ington Cedar in its prime, to the grand and picturesque with 

 the ages. To our view, their expression is one of softened 

 and more lovely beauty with advancing years; vastness 

 harmoniously merges into dignity and elegance, even in the 

 most picturesque, with here and there huge arms thrust 

 out towards the horizon round about; never exhibit the 

 wayward vagrancy of many other trees, but so soon as they 

 approach the appropriate outline of towering symmetry, 



