After travelling through forests made up of other trees of great size it is difficult at first to appreciate the magnitude of the Big Trees. Rising from a swelling base, which is sometimes thirty feet in diameter, the symmetrical trunk reaches up and up, finally terminating in a top three hundred to three hundred and fifty feet above the ground. Their size, their reddish-brown bark, and their small cones, clearly distinguish these trees. Great holes have been burned in many of them, and in the hollows thus formed men have made for themselves comfortable living rooms. In one of the southern groves a fallen hollow tree has been used as a cabin. The Big Trees and redwoods are the last surviving species of a genus which was once widely distributed over the earth. The ancestry of the Sequoia can be traced farther back than that of any of the other living conifers. Impressions of cones and small stems with needles attached belonging to the Sequoia have been found in the oldest rocks of the Coast ranges of California. These cones and stems were washed into some muddy estuary and there buried, millions of years ago. The mud inclosing them was compressed and hardened, and finally changed to slate. This was at last exposed upon the surface through the uplifting of a mountain range and the work of erosion. Some of the groves of the Big Trees have been included in government parks and reservations, but others are being cut as rapidly as possible by the lumbermen. The redwood of the Coast ranges is not easily killed, for it sprouts from the stump, and will in the course of time form forests again; but the Big Trees rarely replace themselves when a grove has been cut down. These trees are so few in number and of such remarkable interest that they should be spared the fate of the common forest tree. It would make you feel sad to visit one of the groves and see, as I did, a fallen giant, fully thirty feet in diameter, lying split open upon the ground. This tree was so large that, in order that it might be handled at all, powder had to be used to blast it in pieces. The tree was knotty, and according to the lumbermen, of little value, and might as well have been left. What excuse is there for the wanton destruction of a noble tree like this one? It must have stood from five thousand to six thousand years. It was a mighty tree at the beginning of the Christian era, and was growing, a strong tree, when our ancestors were the rudest savages in the wilds of Europe.