XVI. THE FLORA OF MOUNT RAINIER 

 BY PROFESSOR CHARLES V. PIPER 



CHARLES VANCOUVER PIPER was born on Vancouver Island, at 

 Victoria, British Columbia, on June 16, 1867. He graduated 

 from the University of Washington in 1885 and since then 

 has received degrees and honors from other institutions and 

 learned societies. He was professor of botany and zoology 

 at the Washington Agricultural College (now State College of 

 Washington) from 1892 to 1903. He has been agrostologist 

 in charge of forage crop investigations for the Bureau of Plant 

 Industry, United States Department of Agriculture, since 1903. 



He has discovered many new forms of plant life and has published 

 many monographs and books in the field of botany. This 

 account of the flora of Mount Rainier was first published in 

 The Mazama (Portland, Oregon) in two articles, one in Volume 

 II, Number 2 (April, 1901), and the other in Volume II, 

 Number 4 (December, 1905). They are reproduced with the 

 consent of the editor of The Mazama, and Professor Piper has 

 revised and amplified them for this purpose. 



Up to an elevation of 4,000 feet or more the flanks 

 of Mount Rainier are clothed in a continuous belt of 

 somber forest, broken only where glaciers and their 

 nascent streams have hewn pathways, or where, alas, 

 fire has left desolate slopes marked here and there by 

 the whitened, weather-worn shaft of some old tree, a 

 dreary monument to its destroyed fellows. This 

 forest is composed in its lower reaches largely of Douglas 

 spruce. Scattered through it in smaller quantities 

 one finds Lovely fir, Western white pine, Western 

 hemlock, a few Engelmann spruces, and on the stream 

 banks cedar and yew, and now and then a little cotton- 

 wood. 



At about the 3,$oo-foot level the character of the 

 forest changes. The Western hemlock gives way to 



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