OUR NATIONAL PAEKS. 31 



boards sawed from any one of these great sequoias, with boards 

 enough left over to build a dozen houses. Automobiles and six- 

 horse teams have been driven up and down the fallen trunks of several 

 great sequoias, and there are regular wagon roads running through 

 gaps in the trunks of several others in our national parks. Two par- 

 allel street car lines and a driveway might be run through the trunk 

 of several of the very largest. 



THE OLDEST LIVING THING 



But the age of the sequoia is still more difficult to realize. It is 

 beyond compare the oldest living thing. 



Several of the trees now growing in hearty maturity in the Sequoia 

 National Park were vigorous youngsters before the pyramids were 

 built on the Egyptian desert before Babylon reached its prime. 

 Hundreds of them were thriving before the heroic age of ancient 

 Greece — while, in fact, the rough Indo-Germanic ancestors of the 

 Greeks were still swarming from the north. Thousands were lusty 

 youths through all the ages of Greek art and Roman wars. Tens of 

 thousands were flourishing trees when Christ was born in Bethlehem. 



But with all its vast age, the sequoia to-day is the embodiment of 

 serene vigor. No description, says Muir, can give any adequate idea 

 of its majesty, much less its beauty. He calls it nature's forest mas- 

 terpiece. He dwells upon its patrician bearing, its suggestion of 

 ancient stock, its strange air of other days, its thoroughbred look 

 inherited from the long ago. "Poised in the fullness of strength and 

 beauty, stern and solemn in mien, it glows with eager enthusiastic 

 life to the tip of every leaf and branch and far-reaching root, calm 

 as a granite dome, the first to feel the touch of the rosy beams of 

 morning, the last to bid the sun good night." 



The sequoia is regular and symmetrical in general form. Its power- 

 ful, stately trunk is purplish to cinnamon brown and rises without a 

 branch a hundred or a hundred and fifty feet— which is as high or 

 higher than the tops of most forest trees. Its bulky limbs shoot 

 boldly out on every side. Its foliage, the most feathery and delicate 

 of all the conifers, is densely massed. The bright green cones are 

 about two and a half inches long, generating seeds scarcely more than 

 an eighth of an inch across. The wood is almost indestructible except 

 by fire. Fallen trunks and broken branches lie for centuries unde- 

 cayed and almost unaltered. 



The sequoias are the glory, as they were the cause, of the Sequoia 

 National Park. Scattered here and there over great areas, they 

 cluster chiefly in thirteen separate groves, and it is in these groves 

 that they attain their greatest size and luxuriance. 



