The unknown complex of causes which brought about the ice age that followed probably completed extermination of the reptiles, and it certainly brought the Sequoia, as a race, perilously near to extinction. The temperature became too cold for life adapted to the warm conditions of the Miocene age. As a result, reptilian life paled and declined, until finally its feeble flame flickered out entirely with the arrival of the glacial epoch. The vast amount of water that had been vaporized during the volcanic eruptions returned to the earth in the form of snow. This accumulated in such enormous quantities that continents came to be white worlds where the vacant sky communed only with the silent ice. Pulseless and cold, these vast continental ice caps were as eloquent of death as were the fiery lava flows. Uncharted, trackless seas of ice they were, with all traces of earthly travail buried far beneath them. And a terrible solitude was the lord of this universe. The scientific world is equally perplexed regarding the mysterious chain of events that again caused the amelioration of climate. At any rate, the warmth of summer gradually overtook the snows of winter, and the ice wasted away. Like morning mist it vanished in the sunshine. Lakes filled the yawning throats of volcanoes. Light and beauty replaced ashes and death. Life, too, ebbed back from the southland and conquered the desolation, filling the vacant world with a glorious animation. But it was a different type of life that came. Mammals instead of reptiles now held undisputed dominion. Of all the rich diversity of life that flourished before the advent of the ordeal of volcanic fire and the chilling empire of ice, apparently only the Sequoia escaped utter destruction. It is this singular survival that prompted John Muir to write of the Sequoia as a “tree which the friendly pines and firs seem to know nothing about. Ancient of other days, it keeps you at a distance, taking no notice of you, speaking only to the winds, thinking only in the sky, looking as strange in aspect and behavior among the neighboring trees as would the homely mastadon and hairy elephant among the bears and deer. It belongs to an ancient stock and has a strange air of other days about it, a thoroughbred look inherited from the long ago—the auld lang syne of trees.” +Chapter II+ THE GLORY OF THE MOUNTAINS OF CALIFORNIA