THE DOUGLAS FIR. 



Pseudotsu'ga Bougla'sii Carr. 



Few men assuredly are commemorated by more last- 

 ing monuments than the Cherokee Sequoia and the 

 Scottish botanical collector David Douglas. The 

 latter was the son of a working mason at Scone, 

 Perthshire, and was early apprenticed in Lord Mans- 

 field's gardens at Scone Palace. Douglas was subse- 

 quently employed in the Glasgow Botanic Gardens, 

 and in 1823, on the recommendation of Sir William 

 Hooker, was sent out to the United States as collector 

 by the Royal Horticultural Society. In the following 

 year he landed at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia 

 River and worked southward, re-discovering the tree 

 which now bears his name in 1826, and bringing it 

 home when, in 1827, he crossed the Rocky Mountains 

 to Hudson's Bay, where he met Franklin, Back, and 

 Richardson returning from their overland Arctic 

 voyage. Sent out again in 1829, he explored Cali- 

 fornia and the Fraser River, and in 1832 and 1833 

 visited the Sandwich Islands, where in 1834 he met 

 his death. Falling accidentally into one of the pits 

 which the natives were in the habit of digging as 

 traps for wild cattle, he was gored and trampled to 

 death by an infuriated bull. 



Many as were the novelties which the ill-fated 

 Douglas introduced into our gardens, the Douglas Fir 

 was not exactly one of them. It had been originally 



33 97 



