Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/478

472 saber-toothed tigers, the sequoias are found from Tasmania to Iceland and Spitzbergen, and from Ireland to Japan. Their remains are everywhere—in France, Italy, Greece, Bohemia, Greenland, America—they had even found their way down along the South American coast as far as Chili.

In the Yellowstone region whole forests have been changed to stone by the mineral waters, or buried in the showers of ashes from the active volcanoes in the vicinity. The remains of the trunks are still from six to ten feet in diameter, and the erect butts are often thirty feet or more in height, standing just as they grew, a veritable Aladdin's forest turned to stone. From a microscopic study of the wood we find that these Yellowstone trees are scarcely to be distinguished from the Californian redwood and it seems a reasonable inference that they represent its direct ancestor, particularly as other petrified woods from western Canada are likewise closely related to the redwood. The Miocene, like the Eocene and Oligocene periods, was characterized to a large extent by vast continental fresh-water deposits laid down chiefly by streams, small lakes and drifting sand. To the westward ran a low range of hills, the embryonic Rocky Mountains, where the ancient crystalline strata were slowly pushing their way upward through the overlying Mesozoic and Tertiary rocks. Around the water courses grew swamp maples and alders, gum trees and mulberries; figs still flourished in the latitude of Puget Sound; saber-toothed tigers hunted the hornless rhinoceroses; and the primitive mastodons with four tusks, two in each jaw, vied with the great horned rhinoceroses for possession of the soil.

The volcanic eruptions, which first became a prominent feature during the Cretaceous, culminated during the Miocene, as the immense number of extinct cones in the western half of North America give abundant evidence. The interval between the close of the Miocene and the modern sequoias is imperfectly known. Climates were becoming cooler and the sequoias were on the wane. But few fossils are found and it is presumed that the elevation of mountain ranges, shutting off the vernal breezes, and the consequent alterations in humidity, as well as the vast changes attendant upon the coming of the ice fields of the glacial period, were sufficient to all but extinguish the noble sequoia family.

At about the time the Neanderthal skull housed the brain of a cave dweller who fashioned the paleolithic flints, and who dwelt in the fear of the great hairy mammoth, the cave bear, the hyena and the woolywoolly [sic] rhinoceros, or shortly thereafter, the sequoias reached their present habitation in California. Could they but hand down to us the record of history embraced in a generation or two, each lasting between two