In 1900 five hundred of the very large trees still remained, the highest reaching from 320 to 325 feet.  Their height, however, appeals to us less than their extraordinary age, estimated by Hutchins at 3,600, or by John Muir, who probably loves them more than any man living, at from 4,000 to 5,000 years.  According to the actual count of Muir of 4,000 rings, by a method which he has described to me, one of these trees was 1,000 years old when Homer wrote the Iliad; 1,500 years of age when Aristotle was foreshadowing his evolution theory and writing his history of animals; 2,000 years of age when Christ walked upon the earth; nearly 4,000 years of age when the “Origin of Species” was written.  Thus the life of one of these trees spanned the whole period before the birth of Aristotle (384 B.C.) and after the death of Darwin (A.D. 1882), the two greatest natural philosophers who have lived.

These trees are the noblest living things upon earth.  I can imagine that the American people are approaching a stage of general intelligence and enlightened love of nature in which they will look back upon the destruction of the Sequoia as a blot on the national escutcheon.

VENERATION OF AGE.

The veneration of age sentiment which should, and I believe actually does, appeal to the American people when clearly presented to them even more strongly than the commercial sentiment, is roused in equal strength by an intelligent appreciation of the race longevity of the larger animals which our ancestors found here in profusion, and of which but a comparatively small number still survive.  To the unthinking man a bison, a wapiti, a deer, a pronghorn antelope, is a matter of hide and meat; to the real nature lover, the true sportsman, the scientific student, each of these types is a subject of intense admiration.  From the mechanical standpoint they represent an architecture more elaborate than that of Westminster Abbey, and a history beside which human history is as of yesterday.

SLOW EVOLUTION OF MODERN MAMMALS.

These animals were not made in a day, nor in a thousand years, nor in a million years.  As said the first Greek philosopher, Empedocles, who 560 B.C. adumbrated the “survival of the fittest” theory of Darwin, they are the result of ceaseless trials of nature.  While the Sequoia was first emerging from the Carboniferous, or Coal Period, the reptile-like ancestors of these mammals, covered with scales and of egg-laying habits, were crawling about and giving not the most remote prophecy of their potential transformation through 10,000,000 of years into the superb fauna of the northern hemisphere.