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.