Select two for examination, and, unfolding, one becomes grass—­soft, succulent, a carpet for dainty feet, a rest for weary eyes, part food, but mostly drink, for hungry beasts.  It exhausts all its energy quickly.  Grass today is, and to-morrow is cut down and withered, ready for the oven.

Try the other seed.  It is of the pin head size.  It is dark brown, hard-shelled, dry, of resinous smell to nostrils sensitive as a bird’s.  The bird drops it in the soil, where the dews fall and where the sun kisses the sleeping princesses into life.

Now the latent powers of that little center of force begin to play.  They first open the hard shell from the inside, then build out an arm white and tender as a nerve fiber, but which shall become great and tough as an oak.  This arm shuns the light and goes down into the dark ground, pushing aside the pebbles and earth.  Soon after the seed thrusts out of the same crevice another arm that has an instinct to go upward to the light.  Neither of these arms is yet solid and strong.  They are beyond expression tender, delicate, and porous, but the one is to become great roots that reach all over an acre, and the other one of California’s big trees, thirty feet in diameter and four hundred feet high.

How is it to be done?  By powers latent in the seed developing and expanding for a thousand years.  What a power it must be!

First, it is a power of selection—­might we not say discrimination?  That little seed can never by any power of persuasion or environment be made to produce grass or any other kind of a tree, as manzanita, mango, banyan, catalpa, etc., but simply and only sequoia gigantea.

There are hundreds of shapes and kinds of leaves with names it gives one a headache to remember.  But this seed never makes a single mistake.  It produces millions of leaves, but every one is awl-shaped—­subulate.  Woods have many odors—­sickening, aromatic, balsamic, medicinal.  We go to the other side of the world to bring the odor of sandal or camphor to our nostrils.  But amid so many odors our seed will make but one.  It is resinous, like some of those odors the Lord enjoyed when they bathed with their delicious fragrance the cruel saw that cut their substance, and atmosphered with new delights the one who destroyed their life.  The big tree, with subtle chemistry no man can imitate, always makes its fragrance with unerring exactness.

[Illustration:  The Big Trees.]

There are thousands of seeds finished with a perfectness and beauty we are hardly acute enough to discover.  The microscopist revels in the forms of the dainty scales of its armor and the opalescent tints of its color.  The sunset is not more delicate and exquisite.  But the big tree never makes but one kind of seed, and leaves no one of its thousands unfinished.

The same is true of bark, grain of wood, method of putting out limbs, outline of the mass, reach of roots, and every other peculiarity.  It discriminates.