580 SEQUOIA AND ITS HISTORY. 
Or, are they remnants, sole and scanty survivors of a race that 
has played a grander part in the past, but is now verging to ex- 
tinction? Have they had a career, and can that career be ascer- 
tained or surmised, so that we may at least guess whence they 
came, and how, and when? 
Time was, and not long ago, when such questions as these were 
regarded as useless and vain,— when students of natural history, 
unmindful of what the name denotes, were content with a knowl- 
edge of things as they now are, but gave little heed as to how they 
came to be so. Now, such questions are held to be legitimate, 
and perhaps not wholly unanswerable. It cannot now be said 
that these trees inhabit their present restricted areas simply be- 
cause they are there placed in the climate and soil of all the world 
most congenial to them. These must indeed be congenial, or they 
would not survive. But when we see how Australian Eucalyptus 
trees thrive upon the Californian coast, and how these very red- 
woods flourish upon another continent; how the so-called wild 
oat (Avena sterilis of -the Old World) has taken full possession of 
California ; how that cattle and horses, introduced by the Spaniard, 
have spread as widely and made themselves as much at home on 
the plains of La Plata as on those of Tartary, and that the car- 
doon-thistle seeds, and others they brought with them, have mul- 
tiplied there into numbers probably much exceeding those extant 
in their native lands; indeed, when we contemplate our one leas 
and our own particular stock, taking such recent but dominating 
possession of this New World; when we consider how the ged 
enous flora of islands generally succumbs to the foreigners phen 
: t 
come in the train of man; and that most weeds (i. €., the prepotent 
not “to the manor 
abandon 
f plants 
plants in open soil) of all temperate climates are 
born,” but are self-invited intruders ;— we must needs 
the notion of any primordial and absolute adaptation © 
and animals to their habitats, which may stand in lieu 
tion, and so preclude our inquiring any farther. The 
Nature and its admirable perfection need not be regard 
ible and changeless. Nor need Nature be likened to 
acast in rigid bronze, but rather to an organism, with pi ole. 
adaptability of parts, and life and even soul informing the ae 
Under the former view Nature would be “the faultless mo 
which the world ne'er saw,” but inscrutable as the Sphinx, ‘ther: 
it were vain, or worse, to question of the whence and W 
harmony of 
ed as inflex- 
of explana- 
whom 
