40 SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. conifers. 



the seventh or eighth year. The flowers open from the first to the middle of July, or as soon as the 

 snow under which this tree is usually buried for many months of the year has melted sufficiently to 

 expose its branches to the sun. The staminate flowers are borne in short spikes and are oval, with 

 scarlet anthers tipped by spur-like crests, and surrounded by involucres of eight or nine bracts. The 

 pistillate flowers are oblong, sessile, clustered, about one third of an inch thick, with bright scarlet 

 scales, and are surrounded by oblong-lanceolate chestnut-brown bracts. The young cones grow but 

 little during their first season, and in the winter are erect and hardly more than half an inch long ; 

 the following summer they become horizontal, and, increasing rapidly in size during a few weeks, are 

 fully grown by the end of August, when they are oval or subglobose, horizontal, sessile, and from an 

 inch and a half to three inches and a quarter long, with much thickened gradually pointed purple 

 scales, the exposed portion being contracted on both sides to a sharp edge bearing a stout nearly 

 triangular more or less incurved dark tip ; they discharge their seeds early in the autumn and mostly 

 fall before winter. The seeds are ovate, acute, subcylindrieal or somewhat flattened on one side by 

 pressure against the bracts of the scales above, from one third to nearly one half of an inch in length 

 and about one third of an inch in diameter, and are covered with a dark chestnut-brown hard thick coat 

 produced into a narrow marginal border ; their wings are thin, chestnut-brown, and about one thirty- 

 second of an inch wide, and remain attached to the scales when the seeds fall ; the cotyledons vary 

 from seven to nine in number. 



Pinus albicauUs inhabits alpine slopes, growing on the most exposed ridges at elevations of 

 between five thousand and nearly twelve thousand feet above the sea-level, and mingling in the 

 northern Rocky Mountains below with Rums flexilis, and above with Abies lasiocarpa, and farther 

 west with the Mountain Hemlock and Abies lasiocarpa. It forms the timber line on many of the 

 high mountains of northwestern America, where it is distributed from about latitude 53° north in the 

 Rocky Mountains 1 and from the valley of the Iltasyouco River, 2 southward over all the high ranges 

 of southern British Columbia, sometimes descending near the sea to altitudes of five thousand feet ; in 

 the United States it extends southward along the Rocky Mountains to the Yellowstone plateau in 

 northwestern Wyoming, where it is common about the head-waters of the Gallatin, Madison, and Snake 

 Rivers, often descending as low as seven thousand five hundred feet above the sea-level ; 3 it occurs 

 on the Blue Mountains of Washington and Oregon, and on the Powder River and Warner Ranges in 

 eastern Oregon, 4 and spreads along the Cascade Mountains of Washington and Oregon, where it is 

 usually found at elevations of about six thousand feet ; in California it forms extensive groves along 

 the timber line on Mt. Shasta at eight thousand feet above the sea-level, ranges along the Sierra 

 Nevada, where it is not common, to the slopes of Mt. Whitney, 5 and reappears on the San Bernardino 

 Mountains, finding here its most southerly home, and forming on Grayback the upper border of the 

 forest at altitudes of between ten thousand five hundred and eleven thousand six hundred and twenty- 

 five feet. 6 



The wood of Pinus albicauUs is light, soft, brittle, and close-grained. It is light brown, with 

 thin nearly white sapwood, and contains thin bands of small summer cells, numerous inconspicuous 

 resin passages, and obscure medullary rays. The specific gravity of the absolutely dry wood is 0.4165, 

 a cubic foot weighing 25.96 pounds. The sweet seeds were gathered and eaten by the Indians, 

 although Clark's Crow, which tears the cones to pieces before they are ripe in order to devour the 

 seeds, left them only scanty harvests. 7 



1 Macoun, Cat. Can. PI 465. 6 Coville, Contrib. U. S. Nat. Herb. iv. 221 (Bot. Death Valley 



2 G. M. Dawson, Can. Nat. u. ser. ix. 328. Exped.). 



3 Tweedy, Garden and Forest, i. 130 {Forests of the Yellowstone ° S. B. Parish, Zoe, iv. 350. 



National Park). 7 Newberry, Popular Science Monthly, xxxii. 36 (Food and Fibre 



4 In the summer of 1896 Pinus albicauUs was found on the highest Plants of the North American Indians). 

 peaks of the Warner Range east of Goose Lake by Dr. C. Hart 



Merriam. 



