Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/480

474 in an attempt to picture the exquisite beauty of that virgin forest, standing age after age in all its unsullied glory—a veritable forest primeval.

Some of the Californian trees were still in their youth and others were approaching middle age when the various hordes of barbarians overran Europe. They had almost reached their full growth at the time of the Wars of the Roses and the discovery of America. They had reached their present height and girth and ripe old age before modern science had commenced its renaissance; in fact, every avenue of human endeavor—social, religious, industrial and intellectual—has shown its most marvelous progress during the time that it has taken the sequoias to add but a few feet to their already giant frames. In the topmost space of Fig. 4 the growth of an existing sequoia through the centuries is illustrated by an imaginary series of sections of the trunk, drawn to scale, showing the comparative diameter of the trunk at the time when the corresponding notable historical events occurred.

We can but wonder at the persistence of this type practically unchanged, for eon after eon, while all around were dissolution and evolution. Their early contemporaries are almost without exception cut off, and were we to go still further back to the probable ancestors of the sequoias, the Voltzias of the earlier ages, we could carry the genealogy back several million more years, almost to the coal period.

And yet the vicissitudes of time have not succeeded in wholly obliterating these ancient records preserved in the great book of history whose torn pages are the solid rock, and we are able to decipher a line here and a broken chapter there, gradually piecing together the main facts of the story, the reading of which becomes not only a labor of love, but a task of the most absorbing interest.