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If she produced the Sequoia gigantea, or the great redwood tree of our California Sierra, as far back as the Crustaceous period, she has propagated it ever since according to her own loving methods, and it is idle to talk of the Sequoia Langsdorfii as being the original ancestor of this tree, or any other distinguished branch of the sequoias.
Eriophorum polystachion. Festuca decumbens. Carex flavescens. Carex gigantea, probably Pseudocyperus. Carex trigona, probably vulpina. Carex elata, probably atrata. Carex nemorosa, probably pendula. And he is of opinion that the seeds may be sown to advantage.
I waited accordingly, and in about an hour the boy returned with the negro; and we continued travelling over a sandy country, covered chiefly with the Asclepias gigantea, until mid-day, when we came to a number of deserted huts; and seeing some appearances of water at a little distance, I sent the boy to fill a soofroo; but as he was examining the place for water, the roaring of a lion, that was probably on the same pursuit, induced the frightened boy to return in haste, and we submitted patiently to the disappointment.
The shells out of the layers of brown limestone, included in the black calcareous shale-rock, which latter, as just stated, replaces the white siliceous sandstone, consist of: Pecten Dufreynoyi, d'Orbigny, "Voyage" Part Pal. Turritella Andii, d'Orbigny, "Voyage" Part Pal. Astarte Darwinii, E. Forbes. Gryphaea Darwinii, E. Forbes. An intermediate form between G. gigantea and G. incurva.
I am thinking particularly of those surprising phenomena left over from pre-historic eras; the "big" trees the sequoia gigantea, which really belong to the early fairy-tales of H. G. Wells, and to those other trees, not so big but still giants the sequoia sempivirens or redwoods, which make of California forests black-and-silver compositions of filmy fluttering light and solid bedded shade.
And similar transformations have without doubt taken place in the pitcher plants of America. Observers in the Cape of Good Hope have noted two plants Roridula dentata and Biblys gigantea, which are evidently following in the footsteps of the sundews, and may be expected in the fulness of years to be their equal partners in crime.
The preceding Cretaceous period has furnished to Carruthers in Europe a fossil fruit like that of the Sequoia gigantea of the famous groves, associated with pines of the same character as those that accompany the present tree; has furnished to Heer, from Greenland, two more Sequoias, one of them identical with a tertiary species, and one nearly allied to Sequoia Langsdorfii, which in turn is a probable ancestor of the common California redwood; has furnished to Newberry and Lesquereux in North America the remains of another ancient Sequoia, a Glyptostrobus, a Liquidambar which well represents our sweet-gum-tree, oaks analogous to living ones, leaves of a plane-tree, which are also in the Tertiary, and are scarcely distinguishable from our own Platanus occidentalis, of a magnolia and a tulip-tree, and "of a sassafras undistinguishable from our living species."
It appears, therefore, that notwithstanding our forest king might live on gloriously in Nature's keeping, it is rapidly vanishing before the fire and steel of man; and unless protective measures be speedily invented and applied, in a few decades, at the farthest, all that will be left of Sequoia gigantea will be a few hacked and scarred monuments.
The presence of the two great families of trees the sequoias and the oaks as far back as the Miocene period, if not extending through the Eocene into the Cretacious, is conclusive of the point we would make, that no great evolutional changes have taken place in the last two or three million years, and none are likely to take place in the next million years, except that the Sequoia gigantea may drop out, from the vandalism of man or the next glacial drift.
The context, however, would seem to show that Duryodhana addressed his preceptor in alarm and not with confidence of success, I, therefore, take aparyaptam to be less than sufficient. It has been observed before that Schlegel renders the names of these conches as Gigantea, Theodotes, Arundinca, Triumpphatrix, Dulcisona, and Gemmiflora, and that Professor Wilson approves of them.
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