usand years ago. Our deepest feelings of reverence are aroused
when we look at a tree which was "one thousand years old when Homer wrote
the Iliad; fifteen hundred years of age when Aristotle was foreshadowing
his evolution theory and writing his history of animals; two thousand
years of age when Christ walked upon earth; nearly four thousand years of
age when the 'Origin of Species' was written. Thus the life of one of
these trees spanned the whole period before the birth of Aristotle (384
B.C.) and after the death of Darwin (A.D. 1882), the two greatest natural
philosophers who have lived."

Considered not only individually, but taken as a group, the Sequoias are
among the oldest of the old. Geologically speaking, most of the forms of
life now in existence are of recent origin, but a full ten million of
years ago these giant trees were developed almost as highly as they are
to-day. At the end of the coal period, when the birds and mammals of
to-day were as yet unevolved, existing only potentially in the scaly,
reptile-like creatures of those days, the Sequoias waved their needles
high in air.

In those days these great trees were found over the whole of Canada,
Greenland, and Siberia, but the relentless onslaught of the Ice Age
wrought terrible destruction and, like the giant tortoises among reptiles,
the apteryx among birds, and the bison among mammals, the forlorn hope of
the great redwoods, making a last stand in a few small groves of
California, awaits total extinction at the hands of the most terrible of
Nature's enemies--man. When the last venerable giant trunk has fallen, the
last axe-stroke which severs the circle of vital sap will cut the only
thread of individual life which joins in time the beating of our pulses
to-day with the beginning of human history and philosophy,--thousands of
years in the past.

Through all the millions of years during which the evolution of modern
forms of life has been going on, then as now, trees must have entered
prominently into the environment and lives of the terrestrial animals.
Ages ago, long before snakes and four-toed horses were even foreshadowed,
and before the first bird-like creatures had appeared, winged
reptile-dragons flew about, doubtless roosting or perching on the Triassic
and Jurassic trees. Perhaps the very pieces of coal which are burned in
our furnaces once bent and swayed under the weight of these bulky animals.
Something like six millions of years ago, l