THE VEGETATION OF “BURNS.” 
BY -T.S.-BRANDEGER, 
The forests of the States west of the Mississippi River are com- 
posed mainly of Coniferee, a family of trees so constituted that 
they furnish much inflammable material for a forest fire, when once 
under full headway. In the western part of Washington and 
Oregon, the woods are almost entirely made up of cone-bearing 
trees, among which the Douglas fir usually predominates, and the 
undergrowth is composed largely of Ericacee with species of 
mosses covering the ground beneath. Forest fires are not unknown 
there, but on account of the damp climate and its consequent vege- 
tation they are much less common than in the drier regions of Cali- 
fornia and the interior. 
The open forests of Colorada and Montana are composed of 
yellow pine (Pinus ponderosa ) with a sprinkling of the Douglas 
fir, and are often endangered by fires which run through them, 
burning the grass, the underbrush, the fallen dead limbs and trunks, 
but without injuring the trees themselves, excepting the thin-barked 
young ones. The Douglas fir, yellow pine, and a few others, 
will stand without injury a fire hot enough to blacken them many feet 
up their trunks, while the hemlocks and spruces ( 7sugaand Adies ), 
are killed by a slight fire at the surface of the ground about the | 
base. Their inability to withstand heat arises from the fact that 
their bark is much thinner than that of the Douglas fir, yellow pine, 
Sequoia, etc. The trees of these forests, killed by a fire and be- 
coming dry afford abundant material for a much hotter conflagra- 
tion in succeeding years, when everything that may have escaped © 
destruction at first is burned to the ground. ae 
The redwood trees of the forests of the northern coast of Cali- 
fornia when killed or burned to the ground, send up a multitude of © 
new shoots from their roots and soon surround the old stumps with 
a new luxuriant growth, from the center of which the parent stump 
in time entirely disappears leaving only the beautiful circular grove — 
characteristic of this species of Sequoia. 
The destroyed forests of Douglas fir of the coast region of Oregon 
and Washington are after a time replaced by a host of young seed- 
lings that grow rapidly; but in the interior, a dry climate, the 
destructiveness of cattle and sheep, the sensitiveness of the young > 
