JOHN MUIR 

 By Charles Sprague Sargent 



Few men whom I have known loved trees as deeply and 

 intelligently as John Muir. The love of trees was born in 

 him, I am sure, and had abundant nourishment during his 

 wanderings over the Sierra, where for months at a time he 

 lived among the largest and some of the most beautiful trees 

 of the world. No one has studied the Sierra trees as living 

 beings more deeply and continuously than Muir, and no one 

 in writing about them has brought them so close to other 

 lovers of nature. 



Muir and I traveled through many forests, and saw to- 

 gether all the trees of western North America, from Alaska 

 to Arizona. We wandered together through the great for- 

 ests which cover the southern Appalachian Mountains, and 

 through the tropical forests of southern Florida. Together 

 we saw the forests of southern Russia and the Caucasus 

 and those of eastern Siberia, but in all these wanderings 

 Muir's heart never strayed very far from the California Si- 

 erra. He loved the Sierra trees the best, and in other lands 

 his thoughts always returned to the great sequoia, the sugar 

 pine, among all trees best loved by him ; the incense cedar, 

 the yellow pine, the Douglas spruce, and the other trees 

 which make the forests of California the most wonderful 

 coniferous forests of the world. With these he was always 

 comparing all minor growths, and when he could not re- 

 turn to the Sierra his greatest happiness was in talking of 

 them and in discussing the Sierra trees. 



