contained 100,000 feet. Another tree, still standing, measures 22 feet in diameter, and it is estimated will yield 200,000 square feet of boards an inch thick.
The wood of the redwood-tree is of a clear red colour with the exception of a thin layer just under the bark, which is almost pure white, and is light, soft, coarse-grained, and susceptible of a high polish. It is the most common and most valuable of all the forest products of the Pacific coast of North America, and is serviceable for a great variety of purposes.
The celebrated "big trees" of California are not to be confounded with the redwood described above, but belong to a different species of the same genus. The big trees are worthy of their name, as they are by far the largest in North America. When full-grown they average about 275 feet in height, with a diameter near the ground of about 20 feet. One of the tallest as yet measured has a height of 325 feet, and the largest a diameter of 35 feet 8 inches inside the bark and 4 feet above the ground. The age of one of these giants, as shown by the number of rings of growth in its trunk, is about thirteen hundred years; another, 24 feet in diameter, is twenty-two hundred years old; and a third showed over four thousand rings of growth, and must have been in its prime at the time of the birth of Christ. The trees occur in detached groves on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada in south-central California, but become more common southward, where they form a genuine forest belt. Their range from north to south is about 260 miles, and their elevation above the sea from 6,000 to 8,000 feet.
"So exquisitely harmonious," says John Muir, in his charming book The Mountains of California, "and finely balanced are even the very mightiest of these monarchs of the woods in all their proportions and circumstances, that there is never anything overgrown or monstrous about them. On coming in sight of them for the first time, you are likely to say, 'Oh, see what beautiful, noble-looking trees are towering there among the firs and pines!' their grandeur being in the meantime in great part invisible,
but to the living eye it will be manifest sooner or later, stealing slowly on the senses like the grandeur of Niagara or the lofty Yosemite domes. Their great size is hidden from the inexperienced observer as long as they are seen at a distance in one harmonious view. When, however, you approach them and walk around them, you begin to wonder at their colossal size and seek a measuring-rod. These giants bulge considerably at the base, but not more than is required for beauty and safety; and the only reason that this bulging seems in some cases excessive is that only a comparatively small section of the shaft is seen at once in near views. One that I measured in the King's River forest was 25 feet in diameter at the ground and 10 feet in diameter 200 feet above the ground, showing that the taper of the trunk as a whole is charmingly fine. And when you stand back far enough to see the massive columns from the swelling instep to the lofty summit dissolving in a dome of verdure, you rejoice in the unrivalled display of combined grandeur and beauty. About 100 feet or more of the trunk is usually branchless, but its massive simplicity is relieved by the bark furrows, which, instead of making an irregular network, run evenly parallel, like the fluting of an architectural column, and to some extent by tufts of slender sprays that wave lightly in the winds and cast flecks of shade, seeming to have been pinned on here and there for the sake of beauty only. The young trees have slender simple branches down to the ground, put on with strict regularity, sharply aspiring at the top, horizontal about half-way down, and drooping in handsome curves at the base. By the time the sapling is five or six hundred years old this spiry, feathery, juvenile habit merges into a firm, rounded dome form of middle age, which in turn takes on the eccentric picturesqueness of old age. No other tree in the Sierra forest has foliage so densely massed or presents outlines so firmly drawn and so steadily subordinate to a special type.... The foliage of the saplings is dark bluish green in colour, while the older trees ripen to a warm brownish-yellow tint, like Libocedrus. The bark is rich crimson brown, purplish in
young trees and in shady portions of the old, while the ground is covered with brown leaves and burrs forming colour masses of extraordinary richness, not to mention the flowers and underbrush that rejoice about them in their season. Walk in the sequoia woods at any time of year, and you will say they are the most beautiful and majestic on earth. Beautiful and impressive contrasts meet you everywhere; the colours of tree and flowers, rock and sky, light and shade, strength and frailty, endurance and evanescence, tangles of supple hazel-bushes, tree pillars about as rigid as granite domes, roses and violets the smallest of their kind, blooming around the feet of the giants. Then in winter the trees themselves break forth in bloom, myriads of small four-sided staminate cones crowd the ends of the slender sprays, colouring the whole tree, and when ripe dusting the air and ground with golden pollen."
Owing to the remoteness of the big trees from commercial centres, they have escaped to a great extent the destruction which everywhere attends the advent of the white man, and some of the finest groves are now under state protection.
The sequoias are not only of interest on account of their great size and grandeur, but from the fact that they are the lingering survivors of an ancient and once widely distributed genus. During the Cretaceous and Tertiary divisions of geological history the genus numbered at least 50 species, as has been shown by leaf impressions, fossil wood, and cones buried in the rocks of New Zealand and Chile on the south, Spitzbergen and Greenland on the north. Over North America they extend from the Atlantic to the Pacific. At present the only two species known, both of which, as already stated, are confined to the Pacific coast, and with the exception of a slight extension of the less gigantic of the two into southwestern Oregon, are found only in California.
While the firs, cedars, and redwoods form the major portion of the forests in the more humid regions on the western side of the continent, there are two species of pines growing in drier situations which in a general view
are even more characteristic of the Pacific forest than are the sequoias. These two pines, well worthy to stand side by side with the giant firs and still more gigantic redwoods, are known as the sugar-pine and the yellow pine.