When that intrepid botanist-explorer, David Douglas, who in his lonely wanderings along the Pacific endured numberless hardships that he might make the flowers and trees of the coast known to science, first saw the Redwoods while traveling through the Santa Cruz forest in 1830, they invoked in him feelings of the most profound awe. He hesitated to describe them lest he fall into discredit among his friends in England. “New and strange things seldom fail to make strong impressions,” he wrote in his Journal, “and are therefore frequently over-rated. This tree gives the mountains a most peculiar, I was going to say, awful appearance—something which plainly tells me that we are not in Europe.” Little did this awestruck wanderer know that yet larger trees stood in these princely forests of the Western world. In fact, almost a quarter century elapsed before the presence of the Giant Sequoia was made known. John Bidwell has sometimes been accredited their discovery in 1841. But the more acceptable and authoritative record of discovery is that of A. T. Dowd who, while hunting, came quite by accident upon the Calaveras Grove eleven years later. Even then Dowd’s story was accepted with much doubt and it was necessary to resort to a ruse in order to induce even a few skeptical workmen to confirm the discovery. Still the truth of David Douglas’ moralizing on the over-rating of strong impressions asserted itself, and traveler after traveler had his reputation for truthfulness sorely tried until almost a “convention of naturalists” had seen the mammoth tree and given their unanimous testimony as to its size. Then the great Sequoia became an almost meteoric celebrity, for few plants have attracted as much attention in so short a period of time. Since then the Sequoia has been lauded in every land as the largest and most nobly proportioned of trees. It has found its way sometimes in a most engaging manner into literature. For instance, in Victor Hugo’s _Toilers of the Sea_, an old seaman who had gathered from his voyages many wonderful stories, tells a child of a hollow tree in California “so vast that a man on horseback could ride one hundred paces inside.” Yet the prodigious size of the Sierra Sequoia is hardly as wonderful as its remarkable age. That it should become known as the oldest living thing that human eyes can look upon is truly marvelous.