The mirror., 1920-12-02
woods in the Yosemite, but these trees are

CdIh CdlilCSt SCttlCIS.
Royalty and wealth collect antiques of
jewelry, painting, statuary, furniture, and
lace, but here are your true antiquities.
Mythology speaks of trees that talk-if
only these trees had tongues to tell of per-
ished centuries and generations spent and
dead. Who courted under them? Did the
extinct dodo bird perch in their branches?
What ancient Warner made them back
log study? pity the tramp who had to
cut this wood to earn his breakfast.
These trees are a. log-jam which has
Aoated down the stream of time-the only
one they could float on. 1t is is a shadeless
forest, poor place for picnic. The only
shade is one of color and the Past. Birds
do not nest or sing in these stone trees; no
winds murmur through their .boughs.
There is no fuel in the trunks-they are
fossil and petrihed like some heads of the
Fuel Administration.
What Fury felled this forest? These
monoliths look like columns that some
fabulous Samson had pulled down. The
only will-o'- -the-wisp that hovers over the
purified" logs (as my guide called them)
is the fire of Fancy. What nomadic MINI
rod hunted here, and what? What pre-
historic bugologist or botanist took speci-
mems from the trees? A blast of wind
once might have knocked them over
only dynamite can do it now. Times
tooth, which devours all, will get an ache
or break if it tackles these trunks. Her
cules had some hard tasks, and it would
have been a difficult one to have built a
, log-cabin from this material. A wood
pecker would fracture his beak on them
at the first peck. Why not use this forest
for our new stone warships?
The Gorgon was tabled monster of
antiquity. Did it make this forest its
home and, with the hard glance of its
googoo eyes, turn these trees to stone? The
stony scenes recall the fable of the en-
chanted palace of Arabia where every
thing was stricken with a marble
paralysis.
The. forest has been excavated and its
dead brought to light by the tireless dig
gers of sun, whirling sand, wind and
rain. Lying in the basin bed of once
old sea, these chips, blocks and trunks that
sparkle like jewels, are from the earliest
genealogical tree-it is knotty question
how old they are. Sterne said he could
love tree in the desert-how would he
feel here where there are acres of them,
quarrries of onyx and marble? Against
this tree bark scientists have barked their
shins. Some say they always grew here
and then settled down half mile. Once
they were about 240 feet high, and may
have been laid low by cyclone, freshet and
submergence. Then they were covered by
a volcanic sea. Pressure changed the fire.
wood to flint. The fall of the trees was
orderly, not as~if by wind or water, but
thrown by an earthquake moving south
from the crest of the continent. Later there
was cross-cut by frosts and shocks, then
tucy DcCduc IOSSlllZCu dllu dIlCiWdIu OIO-
ken. To be plain, Some time during the
stupendous subsidences of the Jurassic Per-
iod, this prone Mesozoic forest sank to
where the vast later sediments of the
Cretacean Era could wash down upon it
a mile Deep" Into this tree fibre pressure
pumped solutions of silica, paste of chalce-
dony, springs of salt, copper, iron and sui
phur. Some pressure, suggesting what is
brought to bear on newspapers to distort,
politics to deceive, business to swindle,
lovers to court on park benches, or church
committees to steal a pastor from one
church and then throw him out to none.
Science then points us to the Tertiary
Age when this forest, dead asleep in its
rocky bed, was called up like Lazarus,
with its sand shroudss upon it, which in
later cons were removed by hands of
erosion and corrOsiOn those twin brothers