170 Distribution of the North American Flora. [March, 
north and south in the continent of America. Whatever might 
otherwise be the extent of the Sequoia’s travels, they are now at 
an end. Man has pronounced the sentence, “ Thus far shalt thou 
go, and no farther!” The doom of these noble groves is sealed. 
No less than five saw-mills have recently been established in the 
most luxuriant of them, and one of these mills alone cut in 1875 
two millions feet of Big-tree lumber; and a company has lately 
been formed to cut another grove. In the operations of the 
California wood-cutters the waste is prodigious. The young, 
manageable trees are first felled ; after which the forest is fired to 
clear the ground and get others out, and thus the saplings are 
destroyed. More destructive still are the operations of the sheep- 
farmers, who fire the herbage to improve the grazing, and whose 
flocks of tens of thousands of sheep devour every green thing, 
and more effectually than the locust. The devastation of the 
California forest is proceeding at a rate which is utterly incredible, 
except to an eye witness. It is true that a few of the most insig- 
nificant groves of the Big-trees at the northern extreme of its 
range are protected by the State Legislature, and that a law has 
been enacted forbidding the felling of trees over fifteen feet in 
diameter, but there is no law to prevent the cutting or burning of 
the saplings, on which the perpetuation of the grove depends, or 
to prevent the burning of the old trees, which, if they do escape 
the fire, will succumb to the drought which the sweeping away of 
the environing forest will occasion. 
During the last quarter of a century the Anglo-Saxon has 
been ruthlessly carrying fire and the saw into the forests of Cali- 
fornia, destroying what he could not use, and sparing neither 
young nor old, and before a century is out the two Sequoias may 
be known only as herbarium specimens and garden ornaments ; 
indeed, with regard to the Big-tree, the noblest of the noble con- 
iferous race, the present generation, which has actually witnessed 
its discovery, may live to say of it, that “ The place which knew 
it shall know it no more,” 
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