drying of the climate, which must once have been much moister than now, would precipitate its doom. Whatever the individual longevity, certain if not speedy is the decline of a race in which a high death-rate afflicts the young. Seedlings of the big trees occur not rarely, indeed, but in meagre proportion to those of associated trees; and small indeed is the chance that any of these will attain to "the days of the years of their fathers." "Few and evil" are the days of all the forest likely to be, while man, both barbarian and civilized, torments them with fires, fatal at once to seedlings, and at length to the aged also. The forests of California, proud as the State may be of them, are already too scanty and insufficient for her uses. Two lines, such as may be drawn with one sweep of a brush over the map, would cover them all. The coast redwood-the most important tree in California, although a million times more numerous than its relative of the Sierra-is too good to live long. Such is its value for lumber and its accessibility, that, judging the future by the past, it is not likely, in its primeval growth, to outlast its rarer fellow-species.

Happily man preserves and disseminates as well as destroys. The species will doubtless be preserved to science, and for ornamental and other uses, in its own and other lands; and the more remarkable individuals of the present day are likely to be sedulously cared for, all the more so as they become scarce.

Our third question remains to be answered: Have these famous Sequoias played in former times and upon a larger stage a more imposing part, of which the present is but the epilogue? We cannot gaze high up

the huge and venerable trunks, which one crosses the continent to behold, without wishing that these patriarchs of the grove were able, like the long-lived antediluvians of Scripture, to hand down to us, through a few generations, the traditions of centuries, and so tell us somewhat of the history of their race. Fifteen hundred annual layers have been counted, or satisfactorily made out, upon one or two fallen trunks. It is probable that close to the heart of some of the living trees may be found the circle that records the year of our Saviour's nativity. A few generations of such trees might carry the history a long way back. But the ground they stand upon, and the marks of very recent geological change and vicissitude in the region around, testify that not very many such generations can have flourished just there, at least in an unbroken series. When their site was covered by glaciers, these Sequoias must have occupied other stations, if, as there is reason to believe, they then existed in the land.

I have said that the redwoods have no near relatives in the country of their abode, and none of their genus anywhere else. Perhaps something may be learned of their genealogy by inquiring of such relatives as they have. There are only two of any particular nearness of kin; and they are far away. One is the bald cypress, our Southern cypress, Taxodium, inhabiting the swamps of the Atlantic coast from Maryland to Texas, thence extending-with, probably, a specific difference-into Mexico. It is well known as one of the largest trees of our Atlantic forest-district, and, although it never-except perhaps in Mexico, and in rare instances-attains the portliness of its Western

relatives, yet it may equal them in longevity. The other relative is Glyptostrobus, a sort of modified Taxodium, being about as much like our bald cypress as one species of redwood is like the other.

Now, species of the same type, especially when few, and the type peculiar, are, in a general way, associated geographically, i. e., inhabit the same country, or (in a large sense) the same region. Where it is not so, where near relatives are separated, there is usually something to be explained. Here is an instance. These four trees, sole representatives of their tribe, dwell almost in three separate quarters of the world: the two redwoods in California, the bald cypress in Atlantic North America, its near relative, Glyptostrobus, in China.

It was not always so. In the Tertiary period, the geological botanists assure us, our own very Taxodium or bald cypress, and a Glyptostrobus, exceedingly like the present Chinese tree, and more than one Sequoia, coexisted in a fourth quarter of the globe, viz., in Europe! This brings up the question, Is it possible to bridge over these four wide intervals of space and the much vaster interval of time, so as to bring these extraordinarily separated relatives into connection? The evidence which may be brought to bear upon this question is various and widely scattered. I bespeak your patience while I endeavor to bring together, in an abstract, the most important points of it.

Some interesting facts may come out by comparing generally the botany of the three remote regions, each of which is the sole home of one of these genera, i. e., Sequoia in California, Taxodium in the Atlantic United

States,' and Glyptostrobus in China, which compose the whole of the peculiar tribe under consideration.

Note then, first, that there is another set of three or four peculiar trees, in this case of the yew family, which has just the same peculiar distribution, and which therefore may have the same explanation, whatever that explanation be. The genus Torreya, which commemorates our botanical Nestor and a former president of this Association, Dr. Torrey, was founded upon a tree rather lately discovered (that is, about thirty-five years ago) in Northern Florida. It is a noble, yew-like tree, and very local, being, so far as known, nearly confined to a few miles along the shores of a single river. It seems as if it had somehow been crowded down out of the Alleghanies into its present limited southern quarters; for in cultivation it evinces a northern hardiness. Now, another species of Torreya is a characteristic tree of Japan; and one very like it, if not the same, inhabits the mountains of Northern China-belongs, therefore, to the Eastern Asiatic temperate region, of which Northern China is a part, and Japan, as we shall see, the portion most interesting to us. There is only one more species of Torreya, and that is a companion of the redwoods in California. It is the tree locally known under the name of the California nutmeg. Here are three or four near brethren, species of the same genus, known nowhere else than in these three habitats.

The phrase "Atlantic United States" is here used throughout in contradistinction to Pacific United States: to the former of course belong, botanically and geographically, the valley of the Mississippi and its tributaries up to the eastern border of the great woodless plains, which constitute an intermediate region.

Moreover, the Torreya of Florida is associated with a yew; and the trees of this grove are the only yewtrees of Eastern North America; for the yew of our Northern woods is a decumbent shrub. A yew-tree, perhaps the same, is found with Taxodium in the temperate parts of Mexico. The only other yews in America grow with the redwoods and the other Torreya in California, and extend northward into Oregon. Yews are also associated with Torreya in Japan; and they extend westward through Mantchooria and the Himalayas to Western Europe, and even to the Azores Islands, where occurs the common yew of the Old World.

So we have three groups of coniferous trees which agree in this peculiar geographical distribution, with, however, a notable extension of range in the case of the yew: 1. The redwoods, and their relatives, Taxodium and Glyptostrobus, which differ so as to constitute a genus for each of the three regions; 2. The Torreyas, more nearly akin, merely a different species in each region; 3. The yews, still more closely related while more widely disseminated, of which it is yet uncertain whether they constitute seven, five, three, or only one species. Opinions differ, and can hardly be brought to any decisive test. However it be determined, it may still be said that the extreme differences among the yews do not surpass those of the recognized variations of the European yew, the cultivated races included.

It appears to me that these several instances all raise the very same question, only with different de