Most impressive of the excellent qualities of the Sequoia, however, is its amazing vitality. In the ability to recover from accident it is probably excelled by no other tree. The shadows of twenty centuries may sleep beneath its boughs, yet its growing power is as active as ever, the tree ever rallying in apparent youthful vigor to replace its broken, tempest-tossed crown. It defies even the wrath of heaven. Though lightning may shatter a pine to splinters, it can but knock off fifty feet, more or less, of a Sequoia’s crown. Never has it been known to have destroyed a Sequoia outright. “Thousands of years the Sequoia stands offering its head to every passing cloud as if praying for heaven’s fire as a blessing,” observed John Muir. “Then when the old head is off, every bud and branch becomes excited like a colony of bees that have lost their queen, and tries hard to repair the damage. Branches that for centuries have grown out horizontally at once begin to turn upward and all the branchlets arrange themselves with reference to a new top of the same ineffably fine contour as the old one. And curious enough, all very old Sequoias have lost their crowns in this manner. Of all living things, they seem to be the only ones able to wait long enough to be struck by lightning.” The power of a Sequoia to heal an immense fire scar is another noteworthy manifestation of its vitality. Its resistance to fire is almost incredible. Its massive, unresinous bark offers an almost asbestos-like exterior to the eternal antagonist of the forest. Its wood, too, is so non-resinous in character that it burns with marked sluggishness, and it is only after repeated attacks by fire that the wood will be consumed. Even when fire has made serious inroads the Sequoia refuses to be discouraged. It musters all its energy and attempts to heal the burned area by extending the living tissue over the blackened wound and reuniting the broken circle of its cambium layer. This healing occurs in a rhythmical and pulsating manner accompanying the seasons, beginning along the margins of the burned area. Each year the layer of new wood-tissue encroaches slowly and patiently upon the injured area, diminishing the charring until the two opposite folds touch one another. In a few years the bark is pinched out and once more the annual layers become continuous around the tree. The wound is healed, and as the centuries pass it recedes deeper and deeper within the heart of the tree, unchanged and never a source of decay.