one in limited numbers in a few choice spots on the Sierra Nevada, the other only along the Coast Range from the bay of Monterey to the frontiers of Oregon? Are they veritable Melchisedeks, without pedigree or early relationship, and possibly fated to be without descent? Or are they now coming upon the stage (or rather were they coming but for man's interference) to play a part in the future? Or are they remnants, sole and scanty survivors of a race that has played a grander part in the past, but is now verging to extinction? Have they had a career, and can that career be ascertained or surmised, so that we may at least guess whence they came and how and when? Time was, and not long ago, when such questions as these were regarded as useless and vain—when students of natural history, unmindful of what the name denotes, were content with a knowledge of things as they now are, but gave little heed as to how they came to be so. Now such questions are held to be legitimate, and perhaps not wholly unanswerable. It cannot now be said that these trees inhabit their present restricted areas simply because they are there placed in the climate and soil of all the world most congenial to them. These must indeed be congenial, or they would not survive. But when we see how Australian eucalyptus trees thrive upon the California coast, and how these very redwoods flourish upon another continent; how the so-called wild-oat (Avena sterilis of the Old World) has taken full possession of California; how that cattle and horses, introduced by the Spaniard, have spread as widely and made themselves as much at home on the plains of the La Plata as on those of Tartary, and that the cardoon thistle-seeds, and others they brought with them, have multiplied there into numbers probably much exceeding those extant in their native land; indeed, when we contemplate our own race, and our own particular stock, taking such recent but dominating possession of this New World; when we consider how the indigenous flora of islands generally succumbs to the foreigners which come in the train of man; and that most weeds (i. e., the prepotent plants in open soil) of all temperate climates are not "to the manor born," but are self-invited intruders, we must needs abandon the notion of any primordial and absolute adaptation of plants and animals to their habitat which may stand in lieu of explanation, and so preclude our inquiring any further. The harmony of Nature and its admirable perfection need not be regarded as inflexible and changeless. Nor need Nature be likened to a statue, or a cast in rigid bronze, but rather to an organism, with play and adaptability of parts, and life and even soul informing the whole. Under the former view, Nature would be "the faultless monster which the world ne'er saw," but inscrutable as the Sphinx, whom it was vain, or worse, to question of the whence and whither. Under the other, the perfection of Nature, if relative, is multifarious and ever renewed; and much that is enigmatical now may find explanation in some record of the past.
