652 Forestry Quarterly. 



tion; and there are projected some 2,000 more miles — Chinese, 

 British, Japanese, Belgian, German, French and Russian enter- 

 prises. Undoubtedly development in railroad building will take 

 place as soon as political affairs become more settled. 



Character of Forest, 



It is difficult to reconstruct from the remnants of forest and 

 from the single specimens of trees that are still to be found the 

 forest types and zones as they must have been originally. It is 

 tolerably certain, however, as Mayr infers, that at one time forest 

 types largely similar to those of eastern North America covered 

 the land area from the shore into the interior of Mongolia and to 

 the rocky mountains of Thibet, although at present this county is 

 partly prairie, partly devoid of all vegetation. 



According to Mayr,* the Chinese forest represents both hori- 

 zontally and vertically all zones of vegetation from the tropical 

 forest to the last representatives of spruce and larch in their short 

 alpine form. 



The tropical zone, to be sure, occupies only a small area. 

 Along the Coast it is represented by the Mangrove (Rhisophora 

 Mangle), in the equatorial region a mighty tree, gradually reduced 

 in size, until at Swatow, precisely on the Tropic of Cancer, it is 

 only an evergreen shrub. The rest of the flora belongs to the 

 Indo-Malayan type ; Diospyros and Pterocarpus, with the cocoa 

 palm and banana, find here their northern limit. 



North from the Tropic of Cancer to the Kuen-Luen mountain 

 range, with its east extension of the Tsinglingshan and Funiushan 

 mountains — the most remarkable continuous mountain range in 

 the world — a sub-tropic forest type, the richest in species, occupies 

 three-quarters of the most densely populated and most intensely 

 cultivated portion of the empire, running in the south to altitudes 

 of 10,000 feet, in the north on the south slopes of the mountains 

 to between 500 and 1,000 feet. Many of the species are still 

 unnamed. The large number of Laurineae is striking, among 

 which Machilus, Litzaea, and the much prized camphor tree, 

 Dryobalanus camphora. Evergreen oaks are characteristic of 

 the cooler portions of the sub-tropic forest, with species of Indian, 



See "Fremdlandische Wald- u. Parkbaume fiir Europa," H. Mayr, 1906. 



