Time was, and not long ago, when such a question bearing on the antiquity of the Sequoia would have been lightly considered. Now, however, mankind is not altogether satisfied with things as they are, but is mindful of how they came to be so, and the ceaseless searches of science are unveiling the mysteries of the past. The spade unearths a coin whose imprint betrays the beliefs or customs, the finish or crudeness, of an ancient civilization. The discovery of a clay tablet, the uncovering of a ruined temple or a forgotten tomb, sheds fresh light upon the history of a people. Bit by bit the evidence accumulates, and as the vision of the past becomes less dim science is better able to conjure up before the mental eye the imposing pageants of a world that has passed away. Shakespeare calls the world a stage. The allusion, though, is confined to men and women. But as the scientist views the great earth-drama that has been enacted throughout the ages he sees a far more extensive application of this thought. To him “the races of the children of life” are the players, by reason of the fact that all life has been superseded by more complex and more highly evolved forms. Indeed, for millions of years countless multitudes of living creatures have played their little parts on this earthly stage and have gone their way into oblivion. The majority have left as little record as the autumn leaves that drift by the wayside. These are the so-called “lost creations.” Yet a sufficient number have been preserved for the later instruction and delight of man. “Everything,” observed Emerson, “in nature tends to write its own history. The planet and the pebble are attended by their shadows, the rolling rock leaves its furrows on the mountainside, the river its channel in the soil, the animal its bone in the stratum, the fern its modest epitaph in the coal.” These remains filed away in the archives of nature’s great storehouse constitute the record of the rocks. And as science reconstructs a civilization of yesterday from its rude implements, in a similar manner it interprets the mute meaning of these fossils in the rocks. The dry bones and empty footprints are given animation and pictured as they are supposed to have been when alive. Great flying reptiles, called _pterodactyls_, with an enormous wingspread of twenty-five feet, have fallen into Miocene seas and have been entombed with the leaves and muds of their shallow bottoms. Huge reptiles, called _dinosaurs_, have stalked across the mud-flats of primeval lakes, leaving their broad footprints in the oozy surface. The tide has come in and gently covered the impression with a fine sediment and preserved it forever. Further deposits of sediment have accumulated and the whole become submerged, until, under constant pressure, they have been compacted into rock and in the course of time have been raised again to dry land.