146 SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. CONIFER. 
feet; and the narrow rounded crown of short horizontal branches loses its regularity, and gains 
picturesqueness from the eccentric development of some of the branches or the destruction of others. 
The bark of old trees is from one to two feet in thickness, and is divided into flat rounded lobes four 
or five feet wide, corresponding to the lobes of the trunk, and separating into loose fibrous scales; it is 
light cinnamon-red, and the outer scales are slightly tinged with purple, which is more conspicuous on 
the much thinner bark of young trees. The leading branchlets are stout, pendulous, and furnished 
with numerous slender crowded much-divided rather closely appressed lateral branchlets, forming dense 
masses of spray; dark blue-green, like the leaves, when they first appear, at the end of two or three 
years and after the disappearance of their leaves the branchlets are reddish brown, more or less tinged 
with purple, and covered with thin close or slightly scaly bark. The leaves are ovate, acuminate, or 
lanceolate, rounded and thickened on the lower surface, concave on the upper surface, and marked with 
bands of stomata on both sides of the obscure midribs, rigid and sharp-pointed, decurrent below, 
spreading or closely appressed above the middle, and from one eighth to one quarter of an inch, or on 
stout leading shoots often half an inch in length; on young seedling plants they are linear-lanceolate, 
short-pointed, thin, spreading, pilose, often ciliate on the margins, and from one half to three quarters 
of an inch in length. The flowers, which open late in the winter or in early spring, are produced in 
great profusion, especially the staminate, which often cover the whole tree, and dust the forest and the 
ground below it with their golden pollen. The staminate flower, which is usually terminal, varies from 
one sixth to one third of an inch in length, with ovate acute or acuminate denticulate connectives, and 
is subtended by broadly ovate scales rounded or acute at the apex, keeled on the back, concave on the 
inner face, and slightly erose on the margins. The pistillate flower is about one third of an inch long, 
with from twenty-five to thirty, or rarely from thirty-five to forty pale yellow scales, slightly keeled on 
the back, gradually narrowed into long slender points, and bearing from three to seven ovules under 
each scale. The fruit is ovate-oblong, from two to three and a half inches in length, from an inch and 
a half to two inches and a quarter in width, and dark red-brown; the scales are furnished on the upper 
side, near the base, with two or three large deciduous dark resin glands,’ and are gradually thickened 
upward from the base to the apex, which is only slightly dilated, and is from three quarters of an inch 
to an inch and a quarter long, and from one quarter to one half of an inch wide, deeply pitted in the 
middle, which is often furnished with an elongated reflexed mucro, and frequently transversely ridged ; 
at maturity they remain straight and rigid and open only slightly, the cone retaining its original form 
even when dry. From three to seven seeds are produced under each scale; they are linear-lanceolate, 
compressed, from one eighth to one quarter of an inch in length, light brown, and surrounded by 
lateral united wings broader than the body of the seed, apiculate at the apex, and often unequal. 
Sequoia Wellingtonia is the largest inhabitant of the American forests, and the most massive- 
stemmed although not the tallest tree in the world. It grows in an uninterrupted belt, chiefly associated 
with the Sugar Pine, the Douglas Fir, and the Incense Cedar, from the middle fork of the American 
River southward along the western flank of the California Sierras for a distance of about two hundred 
and sixty miles to the head of Deer Creek, the northern limit of this belt being near the thirty-ninth 
and its southern just south of the thirty-sixth degree of north latitude, and its elevation from five 
thousand to eight thousand four hundred feet above the level of the sea. North of King’s River it 
appears in isolated groves, sometimes standing from forty to sixty miles apart, and the largest covering 
an area of three or four square miles; on the rim of the cation of the South Fork of King’s River it 
constitutes a forest six miles long and nearly two miles wide; and in the broken rugged basins of the 
Kaweah and Tule Rivers it forms forests which for a distance of seventy miles are interrupted only by 
deep caiions and attain their greatest perfection on the North Fork of the Tule. Restricted to small 
1 These resin glands are thus described by Muir (in litt.): “a soluble in water, and colors it a beautiful purple. It makes good 
dark gritty astringent substance is produced in the cones, and falls ink ; and letters which I wrote with it twenty years ago are still 
out with the seeds, when they are dry, in irregular grains. It is legible.” 
