From a close study of various age classifications, it was believed that the annual growth could be calculated. But even this method has been found unreliable. After a careful study of various ages, Jepson determined upon an average basis of twenty years of growth to every inch. The unfortunate tree in the Calaveras Grove which was ruthlessly cut down that its stump might serve as a dance floor had a diameter of twenty-seven feet, exclusive of bark. Thus, its computed age would have been 6,480 years; whereas, its true age was but 1,300 years. Notwithstanding the impossibility of determining the age of a Sequoia from its diametric measurement, the ages of a representative number of felled Sequoias are definitely known. From these it has been possible to ascertain that the average age of the tree is between 900 and 2,100 years. The oldest Sequoia found by Dudley showed 2,425 annual rings, while the most ancient tree logged thus far in the Converse Basin had an age of 3,148 years. John Muir counted over 4,000 rings on a “majestic, old, fire-scarred monument” in the Kings River forest. These are the oldest trees of which science has definite record. Consequently, it would not be rash to estimate the age of the Grizzly Giant at 3,000 years. Figures, however, of 8,000 years and more are assuredly absurd and fabulous; and yet, they are given by several authors of credit, and by a distinguished authority on fishes in particular. A pile of stones that has looked upon great events possesses an indefinable something that stirs the mind profoundly, lifting it to a higher level of feeling. Byron touched the keynote of this sentiment when he spoke of the “mountains that looked upon Marathon.” Feeling the need of some witness of that event, his imagination vested those blind mountains with sight. Likewise, in beholding the gathered companies of crag and spire from the summit of Mt. Whitney, Clarence King was overwhelmed with a sense of the power and tragedy of geological struggle. Feeling that this splendid mass of granite was contemporaneous with great events, he endowed it with a quality of consciousness. Yet how infinitely more sublime is this feeling when the object is a living thing. What changes have occurred on the earth since the tiny seed of the Grizzly Giant sent down its first threadlike roots to the mineral soil! Thirty centuries are spanned by its life. Even at thought of this the mind teems with images and memories of events that have transpired during the life and growth of this single tree, it endows the blind yet living column with sight, places it upon some lofty height, and imagines that far below it sees “the far-winding path of human progress, from dim Cimmerian shores of prehistoric shadow into the fuller yet broken and fitful light of the modern time.”