without forests, a woodless, treeless waste. What a desolate picture is
this! What a grave charge will the people of the future have to bring
against us that we recklessly destroy the trees, one of God's most
beautiful and useful gifts to man, without even an endeavor to replace
the loss by replanting!

During the last hundred years the American lumber belt has moved
westward over a wide space. In the early days of our history nearly the
entire supply came from Maine, and what interesting stories we have of
those brave pioneer loggers and settlers! Gradually the noble woods
which furnished the tall, smooth masts for which American ships were
famous, were destroyed; and the ringing ax blows were then heard in the
forests about the Great Lakes and in the middle Southern states. This
supply is by no means exhausted, but to-day the heart of the lumber
interest is on the Pacific coast.

Around the great central valley which is drained by the Sacramento and
the San Joaquin rivers, six hundred and forty miles long, lie mountain
ranges on whose slopes are some of the noblest forests of the world. To
the north of the central valley the trees of the east and west join,
forming a heavily wooded belt quite across the state.

In the trade, the greatest demand is for lumber of the pine and fir
trees, and of these California has as many species as Europe and Asia
combined. She has, indeed, only a little less than one fifth of all the
lumber supply of the United States. Her most valuable tree for commerce
is the sugar pine. It attains a diameter of twelve feet or more and is
often two hundred feet high. But the most interesting trees of
California and of the world are the Sequoias, the oldest of all living
things. Very far back, in the time of which we have no written history,