Post 24995
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Forest fires have been common through the ages. Charcoal has been found in fossil. This has a possible age of a million years. Charred logs have been found, in Dakota and elsewhere, several hundred feet beneath the surface. The big trees of California have fire scars that are two thousand years old.
The most remarkable forest fire records that I ever saw were found in a giant California redwood. This tree was felled a few years ago. Its trunk was cut to pieces and studied by scientific men, who from the number of its annual rings found the year of its birth, and also deciphered the dates of the various experiences the tree had had with fire.
This patriarch had stood three hundred feet high, was sound to the core, and had lived through two thousand one hundred and seventy-one years. Its existence began in the year 271 B.C. After more than five centuries of life, in A.D. 245 it was in the pathway of a forest fire from which it received a bad burn on the lower trunk. It was one hundred and five years before this burn was fully covered with tissue and bark.