The daily morning journal and courier., 1900-05-08

buried forests Stony trunks now form
 conspicuous and striking feature ris- ing from the soil among the living trees
 of the present day, the larger specimens vastly surpassing in diameter any of
 the trees now growing there. The stumps are of various heights, from | those just projecting from the soil to others that are ten, twenty, even thirty | feet high. With them are broken frag- ments and prostrate trunks lying about.
 It seems as if the smaller trees and un- dergrowth of to-day are now feebly try ing to hide from sight the dead giants of the older times.
 One of the species of Sequoia de- scribed from these beds Is called Se- quoia Magnifica because of it's majestic size. It furnishes more of the fossil wood now found in the Park than any other species. Its foliage and cones and the structure of its wood closely resem-
 bles those of living Sequoia of Cali
 fornia. The trunks range in size up to
 ten feet In diameter. In the fuller de-
 scriptione by explorers there are given many details of which I cite but one ex
 ample. Speaking of a stump which is figured in one of the plates, it is de- scribed as "26 1-2 feet in circumference, without the bark, and rising about twelve feet high!" "The roots are im- bedded in the solid rock, as is shown in the figure, "and this is not probably the largest. It is a striking object standing among the smaller trees of the present Park forest
 Reading the technical and detailed de- scriptions the mind naturally turns to another and better known scene of de- struction by volcanic ashes, to the slopes of Vesuvius and the buried cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii. Those ancient cities were suddenly buried, their houses their art, their magnifi- cence, and in all their glory, just as these forests were, and later were cov- cred by lava, as some of the forests have been, to be found again centuries later and after the new surface had long been occupied by new population and covered with modern villas. But the 1900 years since the eruption of Ve- suvius, which destroyed those cities is as but day compared with tEe vastly longer periods required to pile up those strata until nearly half a mile thick and then for the clements to carve the hills into their present shape. It has taken century or more for man to uncover the small portions of the buried cities, but how short time compared with the ages of sunshine and storm at work un- covering these buried forests. Nowhere else on earth do we get such a sugges- tive inkling as to what these old forests were and how they appeared. And after all, wonderful as is their preservation, how very imperfect is the picture. We see that the stumps of these old Se- quoias had the same shape that the 1iv- ing species in California have, that the wood had the same structure, that the foliage and cones had also a like sem blance, and that is all. How that old forest landscape actually looked is left for us to imagine from the data we have.
 We need to save the few living Se- quoias groves we have left with us, to help the imagination to carry us back to those earlier scenes on our planet. Ma ture has entrusted them to our keeping. Let us not betray that trust. It would have been more than a blunder to allow them to be destroyed merely for the lumber their majestic trunks would fur nish It would have been a crime against the intellectual culture of com Ing generations, and sin against American civilization.
 VIM. H. BREWER.