2 WEST AMERICAN OAKS. 



together; cups an inch or less in breadth, usually hemispherical, and the nut exserted for 

 half its length or more, sometimes nearly spherical and concealing all but the apex of the 

 nut ; scales ovate-lanceolate, obtuse, tomentose-pubescent ; nut ovoid, obtuse, an inch long 

 or less, often somewhat tomentose. 



Habitat. On the Coast Ranges and on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, 

 throughout California and as far north as the middle of Oregon ; on mountain sides and 

 summits only, or in the elevated valleys, not on the plains or near the sea. The species 

 does not usually form a forest by itself. The trees are commonly distributed one here and 

 another there, among other oaks, and forming groves together with several members of the 

 white oak series ; and yet, the most beautiful forests beautiful in the stricter sense, not 

 from a utilitarian point of view which the present writer has seen in California are made 

 up almost entirely of this oak. Certain broad and comparatively level-topped mountains 

 westward from Camptonville, in Yuba County, in the middle altitude of the Sierra, are 

 thickly wooded with it. Here its trunks are tall and straight, and branch only at a dis- 

 tance of thirty or forty feet from the ground, the open branches forming, over hundreds of 

 acres, a mild shade, not too deep or too dark to exclude or weaken a rich undergrowth of 

 wild roses {Rosa spithamoed) and the finer sorts of ceanothus ( Ceanothus decumbens and C. 

 tntegerrimus.) besides many grasses and herbaceous flowering plants. 



Remarks. This tree is the Pacific Coast analogue of the Eastern Red Oak. Dr. 

 Kellogg, in his Forest Trees of California, says of the wood of it that it abounds in sour 

 sap, of which it is very retentive, and dries slowly ; but if this is abstracted by soaking, 

 or even by seasoning well, it makes excellent axles for trucks, buffers for cars, and is 

 available for many useful purposes. He also says that, although often seventy-five feet 

 high, a trunk will seldom furnish two or three lengths of saw-log timber ; this being due 

 to the presence of what lumbermen call pin-knots, namely perforations of the trunk at the 

 bases of branches long since fallen. 



There is a considerable range of variability in the species as regards leaf-outline and 

 the depth of the acorn-cup. That form in which the cup is nearly spherical, almost 

 wholly enveloping the nut, ought perhaps to be named as a variety. 



