ON VARIATION 
shed its seeds in this way, nor is there any 
inducement in them or their covering to tempt an 
animal to carry them away. 
They grow in clusters about the trunk and 
branches, but remain attached to the tree. The 
cones which hold them do not even open. Some- 
times nine or ten crops of these seed cones may 
be observed clinging to a parent tree. 
But whenever the woods are visited by a forest 
fire, the cones are dried out by the heat, and the 
seeds, released, fall to the ground and sprout. 
In the localities in which these trees grow, there 
would be little chance for their seeds to germinate, 
in fact, except after a forest fire had cleared the 
ground. 
Against the competition of all of the hardy 
underbrush to be found in those localities, the 
mother tree, it would seem, fears that her seeds 
will have but a poor chance. 
Yet when the fires have cleared the ground and 
killed almost every other living thing, these seeds 
spring up almost as quickly and almost as thickly 
as grass on a lawn; and, competition removed, 
they grow with surprising rapidity into the 
making of a new forest. 
It has been observed that these trees grow. 
usually along the sides of deep canyons where the 
destructiveness of the fire is the greatest—and only 
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