A journalist who accompanied Chaney on his trip to China wrote that the Metasequoia is a remote ancestor of California's giant redwoods.

"Hevens, the Metasequoia hasn't anything to do with redwoods; sequoia is a magic word in California for fund raising," Merrill retorted, and added, "any alliance must be with the swamp cyprus."

In trying to substantiate the redwood thesis, Chaney has written more than a dozen of the 140-odd articles published to date about the Metasequoia.

The press greeted the 1947 Arboretum expedition with a flood of publicity and two different writers asked Merrill to "confirm" the following story: A Harvard-trained botanist in the Air Force was flying over the hump during the war when was forced to bail out over China. He landed unconscious, and when he recovered he found he was lying under a Metasequoia--"in other words his training at Harvard was so good that he knew all about the tree before botanists even knew the species," Merrill chuckled yesterday.

The Living Tree

Fossil tremauts of the Metasequoia were only discovered in 1940 and later assigned a genus. Yet within a year a single living tree was found in China. Recent studies show that these trees once stretched all over the North temperate zone to as far North as Spitzbergen, an island above Norway.

Local skiing enthusiasts are not the only ones who hope for a long, hard winter; Merrill wants to see if the Metasequoia can stand a Northern habitat. Ideally the Metasequeia grows best in humid regions--Chapel Hill. North Carolina, now holds the record for height here with a 12 and a half foot specimen Shropshire, England, beasts the largest plantation with 2,000 trees.

Subsequent expeditions to the Metase quoia valley have brought the total to about 1500 trees, some of them reaching a height of 140 feet.

Economically the Metasequoia's value is still undetermined. The Chinese use it for construction purposes: Merrill thinks it may take the place of the white pine as a timber crop in countries where light lumber is scarce--especially in England and New Zealand and perhaps southeastern Australia. South Africa and certain parts of South America.

The thousands of trees now growing are even-aged because they came from the same lot. Merrill hopes comparison of the rate of growth may give some indications of the best clime.

The tree's range is unbelievable. If grows in the tropics, in higher altitudes above 7,000 feet and in practically every European country. Chaney reports that 50 trees lived through the 1949 Alaskan winter during which the earth froze to a depth of four feet. They are said in Finland to have survived a minimum temperature of 50 degrees centigrade

A Metasequoia is easy to grow and propagation from cuttings is child's play. Merrill claims that "anyone who can root geranium cuttings can raise Metasequoias." One professor ran some branches through an ordinary meet-grinder and found a very high percentage of them took root. "It is the easiest cornifer to propagate by soft or hardwood cuttings," according to Merrill.

Unlike most conifers the Metasequoia has its leaves arranged on exactly opposite sides of the stalk instead of alternating. The cones are small like those of the hemlock or larch.

Unfortunately the future of Metasequoia is still in doubt. The original source of this possible timber crop is limited to only 800 square miles. Roscoe Pound, former Dean of the Law School helped organize a group to preserve the Metasequoia valley as a National Park. "Maybe the Metasequoias will survive better under the new Chinese regime," Merrill commented hopefully, "the Nationalists were cutting them heavily.