GYMNOSPERM^. 



33 



Genus — Sequoia. 



The Seqnoise are moncecious. Their cones are ovate, ligneous, persistent, and terminal 

 on the branchlets, one to two inches in length, composed of sixteen to thirty-five wedge- 

 shaped scales, with a wrinkled and depressed, transversely oblong, nail-like head, 

 mucronated in the centre. In existing species they are solitary, but clustered in several 

 fossil species. The foliage is distichous and yew-like in S. sempervirens, and spirally 

 imbricated in S. gigantea, though both occasionally foliate in the opposite way. These 

 are the only existing species of a genus which was widely spread during the Tertiary 



Fig. 11. — Cone of Seqv.oia FiG. 12. — Cone of Sequoia gigantea. 

 sempervirens. (Figs. 11 — 14 

 are from Veitcli's ' Manual 

 of the Coniferae.') 



Fig. 13— Male 

 flowers, Seq. 

 gigantea. 



Fig. 14. — Male flowers, 

 S. sempervirens. 



period. The former, better known as the Red-wood, occupies the Coast Range, a sandy 

 ridge rising to a height of 2000 feet, and forms dense forests, twenty to thirty miles in 

 width, from a little south of Santa Cruz to the southern borders of Oregon, following the 

 coast-line for some 350 to 500 miles ; its distribution depending according to Professor 

 Bolander, upon the sandstone and oceanic fogs. The second species, S. gigantea, 

 extends at intervals along the western slope of the Sierra Nevada for nearly 200 miles, 

 and at elevations of from 5000 to 8000 feet. " Towards the north the trees occur as 

 very small, isolated, remote groves of a few hundreds each, most of them old, and inter- 

 spersed amongst gigantic pines, spruces, and firs, which appear as if encroaching upon 

 them. Such are the groves visited by tourists (Calaveras, Mariposa, &c.). To the south, 

 on the contrary, the Big-trees form a colossal forest forty miles long, and three to ten 

 broad, whose continuity is broken only by the deep sheer-walled canons that intersect 



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