Yet another of these enormous charcoal-lined cylinders lies prostrate not far away. Early travelers were accustomed to pursue each other through it on horseback. But this pastime was put to an abrupt end by a nearby Sequoia falling across it and breaking in the roof. Since then spring floods have deposited considerable quantities of sediment, lessening its diameter, so that today a man can just walk erect through it. Still other similar fragments, the monuments of departed monarchs of other centuries, dot the forest floor. To search these out is a pleasure worth the climbing of a mountain to enjoy. Through ragged knot-hole openings charming and enchanting glimpses of the forest may be obtained. Seemingly, all that is unattractive is hidden from view and the beauties of the picture can be contemplated at leisure. Far greater than the destructive work of time is that of man. Against his double-bitted axe the Sequoia is completely powerless. Ironically enough, the larger and more remarkable the tree the more certain and swift its doom. The rarity of the species is no bar against its destruction. Indeed, man seems even eager to barter this most priceless heritage for a handful of yellow gold. Wherever greed has had free rein the Sequoia has been lumbered. For the past fifty years cuttings in privately owned holdings of Sequoian tracts have continued unchecked. The axe has removed a large part of the Sequoias in the Redwood Mountain, Merced, and Tule River regions, and the sawmill is still at its work of destruction in the magnificent forests of the Kings and Kaweah River basins. “Earlier cutting,” states Sudworth, “took only a part of this timber, but the later operations have removed practically every tree.” Has man no regard for the past—no sentiment of conservation for the future? How can he trace the arduous survival of the Sequoia through geological ages without acquiring a peculiar admiration and love for it? How can he look upon such a living monument which connects the past with the present and blink at its intellectual and aesthetic value? When the Germans bombarded Rheims in 1914 and Turkish cannon demolished the Parthenon of Athens in 1687, all lovers of architecture and the beautiful stamped such acts as barbarism. But the rose window of Rheims and the colonades of the Parthenon _can_ be restored. They were merely man-made. Living things, however, once destroyed are forever lost to the world. When the axe destroys a Sequoian grove it is irrevocably gone, for, after all, “only God can make a tree.”