My life : a record of events and opinions - Wallace-online.org

A LECTURE-TOUR IN AMERICA 277embedded in the floor under a chasm opening above.The print of an Indian mocassin is also shown petrifiedby the stalagmite. Rats and mice are found with verylarge eyes ; and there are some blind insects andSeveral milescentipedes, as in the Mammoth Cave.of caverns and passages have already been explored,but other wonders may still be hidden in its deeperrecesses.From Cincinnati I continued my journey westward,paying short visits to Kansas City, Denver, andSalt Lake City, and then on to San Francisco, whereImet my brother John.A few days after my arrival in San Francisco Iwas taken for a drive by a friend, Dr. Gibbons, intothe foothills to see the remains of the Redwood forestthat once covered them, but which had all beenruthlessly destroyed to supply timber for the city andtowns around. We wound about among the hillsand valleys, all perfectly dry, till we reached aheight of fifteen hundred feet, where many clumps ofyoung redwoods were seen, and, stopping at one ofthese, Dr. Gibbons took me inside a circle of youngtrees from twenty to thirty feet high, and showed methat they all grew on the outer edge of the hugecharred trunk of an old tree that had been burnt down.This stump was thirty-four feet in diameter, or quiteas large as the very largest of the more celebratedBig Trees, the Sequoia gigantea. The doctor hadsearched all over these hills, and this was the largeststump he had found, though there were numbersbetween twenty and thirty feet. The tree derivesits botanical name, sempervirens (ever-growing) fromthe peculiar habit of producing young trees from theburnt or decayed roots of the old trees. Theseenormous trees, being too large to cut down, were