The American Museum Journal

CONTENTS FOR NOVEMBER, 1912

Frontispiece, A Living Lungfish, Photograph by Julius Kirschner..

Present Condition of the California Bigtrees. . GEORGE B. SUDWORTH

Acreage of bigtree forests Where lumbering is in progress replace the old

Photographs by the Author

Who owns them and guards them from fire-
Can new forests of young bigtrees be made to

Zoology of the Stefánsson-Anderson Expedition- A Preliminary

Estimate.....

226

227

R. M. Anderson in Unexplored Arctic America.

238

With quotations from this zoologist's letters written to the Museum during the past four years

Sea worm group made from field studies at Woods Hole, Massachusetts

Facts and Theories relating to the Ancestry of Man. W. D. MATTHEW

255

Important zoological collections from a region of unexplored forests and lakes

Museum Notes.

268

MARY CYNTHIA DICKERSON, Editor

Subscription, One Dollar per year. Fifteen cents per copy

A subscription to the JOURNAL is included in the membership fees of all classes of members of the Museum

Subscriptions should be addressed to the AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL, 30 Boylston St., Cambridge, Mass., or 77th St. and Central Park West, New York City

Entered as second-class matter January 12, 1907, at the Post-Office at Boston, Mass.,

A LIVING LUNGFISH THE SECOND SPECIMEN EVER BROUGHT TO THE UNITED STATES

It came from Africa in a dry clod of earth from the bottom of a dried-up stream and is here shown fully recovered from its months of out-of-water
existence. It is pale colored, sleek, its back fin with waxy bloom, its lateral fins delicate and straight (Compare with cut on page 251). The lungfish
pictures the kind of fish which gave rise to land-living animals. It uses its fins in a fashion to suggest the legs of a salamander and has many striking
structural similarities to a salamander

"A Fish Out of Water," page 251

"Lady Lena" bigtree with room cut out and door fitted in the trunk. Diameter 21 feet. Sequoia National Forest, Tulare County, California

E

By George B. Sudworth

[CHIEF OF DENDROLOGY, UNITED STATES FOREST SERVICE]

VERYONE who has visited California's famous sequoias admits that their real grandeur and the reverence they inspire cannot be appreciated without standing in their presence. Comparisons with other trees fail utterly to give a correct impression of their gigantic size. 1 The Museum's specimen of bigtree collected by special expedition to California some twenty years ago, has been recently moved from the Darwin hall to the west end of the forestry hall. Here it has been newly faced off and put again on exhibition with labels pointing out the centuries of growth from 550 A. D. to 1891 A. D. and relating the history of this growth to that of the development of the world's science and art.

Interest in the bigtree is peculiarly great at this time when wood and forest production are recognized paramount in importance to the American nation. Is there a future as well as a past for this tree from prehistoric times, which has the ability to attain a height of 300 feet and an age greater than that of any other living thing, and which has remarkable value whether destined for the timber market or permanently for the mountain side? Can young sequoia forests be made to rise on land bared of their giant forefathers by fire or lumbermen? The question has been a disputed one. Dr. Sudworth's article represents personal investigation in the various California groves. The photographs are by the author.-M. C. D.

OLD BURNED TRUNK OF CENTENNIAL EXPOSITION BIGTREE

This tree was cut in 1876 to gain a section for the centennial exposition. Interior view in Sequoia National Forest (photographed in 1900;

CALIFORNIA BIGTREES

229

With the possible exception of a sister species, the Coast redwood, and some of the Australian eucalypts, the bigtree is unique among the world's living arborescent plant forms. While it lives in a land where pines and firs grow to enormous size and to great age, even the largest of the latter is small in comparison with the sequoia towering one hundred to one hundred and fifty feet higher, its trunk broader by twenty or more feet, and from two thousand to nearly three thousand years older.

The North Calaveras bigtree grove was the first one discovered (1841), and the renown of this tree in America and abroad probably came chiefly from accounts of the trees as seen there, although later from the Mariposa grove. Forty or more years ago botanists and a few explorers knew in a general way that the sequoia ranged from the North Calaveras grove southward in the Sierras to the Tule River country, but until quite recently we have had no published account of the exact location and extent of all of the existing "groves" and "forests." Singularly enough however, the locations of these trees, so long unknown to published literature, were familiar to the early back country settlers and lumbermen, and particularly