(£oc% (mountain T&onberfanb 



are usually stuck a few inches apart in two 

 vertical opposite rows along the slender trunk. 

 Each knob-like cone is held closely against the 

 trunk by a short, strong stem. 



I have a ten-foot plank from the heart of a 

 large tree which shows twenty-eight imbedded 

 cones. The biography of this tree, which its 

 scroll of annual rings pictured in the abstract, 

 is of interest. The imbedded cones grew upon 

 the sapling before it was thirty years old and 

 when it was less than twenty-five feet high. 

 They appeared upon the slender trunk before 

 it was an inch in diameter. Twenty-six annual 

 wood-rings formed around them and covered 

 them from sight as completely as the seeds the 

 cone-scales clasped and concealed. The year 

 of this completed covering, as the annual rings 

 showed, was 1790. Then the tree was sixty- 

 six years of age; it came into existence in 1724, 

 and apparently, from the forest-history of the 

 place, in the pathway of a fire. This lodge-pole 

 lived on through one hundred and eighty-two 

 years. In the spring of 1906 a woodsman cut 

 it down. A few weeks later two-inch planks 



222 



