154 FOREST commissioner's report. 



Still greater decline in respect to spruce is seen as we leave 

 the great plateau and go off to its lower and more fertile 

 edges. In the lower lying and better soiled portions of the 

 Aroostook country stand the finest hard woods anywhere to 

 be found in the State. These are mixed, of course, with 

 evergreen trees to some extent — Aroostook indeed is said 

 once to have had some of the very finest pine — but the l)etter 

 and typical portions of Aroostook neither have now nor ever 

 did have any large amount of spruce. The soil conditions 

 are too generous. Other species are more appropriate to 

 them. Similarly on the southern borders of the great plateau. 

 The lower towns of the Penobscot and Kennebec gradually 

 lose their spruce, while west of the Kennebec where the 

 boundary of the elevated land is sharper, the fiiU-off marks as 

 sharply the distribution of spruce as timl)er. Travellers by 

 rail along the mellow lands of the Androscoggin and Sandy riv- 

 ers, surrounded by pine groves and the familiar hard woods of 

 Maine, may yet be assured that but a i'ew miles away, in the 

 mountains of the background, lies some of our finest spruce- 

 bearing country. 



foiilnvs^"'^'^ Not exactly part of our subject, and yet so closely 

 spruce. related to it that it should be here mentioned, is 



the distribution of the white and gray birch, Betula papyrifera 

 and jBetuIa j^opulifoh'a. Of these two species, the former in 

 the climatic and topographical conditions which it seeks 

 follows very closely the spruce. The latter, on the other 

 hand, seems somewhat less hardy than pine. The finest 

 white l)irch groves ever seen by the writer stand on the shores 

 of the Rangeley lakes — exactly the location of the finest spruce 

 that the State possesses. Twenty miles south on the other 

 hand, on the low and sandy lands of the lower course of the 

 Androscoggin, the birch seen is quite as uniformly the gray. 

 Neither of course was a large element in the natural forest, 

 but they have come in largely on burnt and cleared land. The 

 dividing line between them, going with the topography of the 

 country, is fairly sharp and clear. 



