218 ESSAYS. 
are twenty-eight degrees, and the forest on the coast runs some 
degrees north of this; the length may therefore make up for 
the comparative narrowness of the Pacific forest region. How 
can so meagre a forest make so imposing a show? Surely 
not by the greater number and size of its individuals, so far 
as deciduous (or more correctly non-coniferous) trees are con- 
cerned ; for on the whole they are inferior to their eastern 
brethren in size if not in number of individuals. The rea- 
son is, that a large proportion of the genera and species are 
coniferous trees; and these, being evergreen (except the 
Larches), of aspiring ‘port and eminently gregarious habit, 
usually dominate where they occur. While the east has almost 
three times as many genera and four times as many species of 
non-coniferous trees as the west, it has slightly fewer genera 
and almost one half fewer species of coniferous trees than the 
west. That is, the Atlantic coniferous forest is represented 
by eleven genera and twenty-five species; the Pacific by 
twelve genera and forty-four species. This relative prepon- 
derance may also be expressed by the diagrams, in which the 
smaller inclosed rectangles, drawn on the same scale, repre- 
sent the coniferous portions of these forests. 
Indeed, the Pacific forest is made up of conifers, with non- 
coniferous trees as occasional undergrowth or as scattered 
individuals, and conspicuous only in valleys or in the sparse 
tree-growth of plains, on which the Oaks at most reproduce 
the features of the ‘“‘ Oak-openings ” here and there bordering 
the Mississippi prairie region. Perhaps the most striking 
contrast between the west and the east, along the latitude 
usually traversed, is that between the spiry evergreens which 
the traveler leaves when he quits California, and the familiar 
woods of various-hued round-headed trees which give him the 
feeling of home when he reaches the Mississippi. The At- 
lantic forest is particularly rich in these, and is not meagre in 
coniferous trees. All the glory of the Pacific forest is in its 
coniferous trees ; its desperate poverty in other trees appears 
in the annexed diagram. 
These diagrams could be made more instructive, and the 
relative richness of the forests round the world in our latitude 
