ii 4 PRACTICAL ARBORICULTURE 



spruce, concolor, but has a distinct reddish cast. It is a handsome, symmetric 

 tree, leaves in fives, some fours, two and one-half inches long. Cone three 

 and one-half inches long, two and one-fourth inches broad when open. Leaves 

 come out on every side of branch, running in spirals, so that young branches 

 look like plumes. Cones, singly, in pairs and in threes at times. One tree in 

 Ward was 55 inches in girth, and 25 feet high. 



It is scarcely profitable to discuss the climatic effect of these for 

 which cover the higher mountains, and their control of rainfall and moisture- 

 laden air currents, together with their influence upon the country for a thou- 

 sand miles distance, when the United States Weather Bureau has officially 

 declared that forests have no influence either upon cloud movement or pre- 

 cipitation. An official declaration by an employee of the Government has 

 very great weight and is by many considered infallible, even though it be as 

 false as this one. Yet, notwithstanding such scientific authoritative denial, 

 the written history of more than three thousand years contains innumerable 

 repetitions of drought, famines, pestilence, aridity, together with uncontrolled 

 storms, tornadoes, cyclones and violent climatic disturbances, which have fol- 

 lowed the acts of man in forest destruction, and it is logical to presume that 

 the systematic planting of forests upon the mountains where they have been 

 destroyed by man's agency in clearing or through man's neglect in allowing fires 

 to ravage the country, as well as upon the plains where for ages no trees have ex- 

 isted, will in due course of time produce beneficial results, ameliorating the condi- 

 tions of the entire country. 



Compared with the world's history, running through forty centuries, 

 American occupation has been brief, and the results of forty years' recorded 

 weather observation at Cincinnati, O., upon which the erroneous claims of the 

 United States Weather Bureau are based, can scarcely be recognized as off- 

 setting the records of four thousand years, and the declarations of Aristotle, 

 Josephus, Moses, Menander, Prescott, and many other most noted historians. 



INFLUENCE OF THE CONTINENTAL DIVIDE. 



There is probably no one feature in the topography of North America, 

 especially while we are considering the United States, which so greatly influ- 

 ences climatic conditions and thereby controls so largely the material interests 

 of this country as does the range of Rocky Mountains, the higher connected 

 points of which are designated as the Continental Divide. 



Upon these highest elevations, where the temperature is usually quite 

 low, moisture is precipitated from the clouds which have been formed by the 

 vapor arising from the warm currents of the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of 

 Mexico. It is the presence of these high mountains, the Continental Divide, 

 which causes the aridity of the Western plains region to eastward by with- 

 drawing the moisture which would otherwise be broadly distributed in the 

 form of rain. 



It is from the melting snows of these mountain slopes that many of the 

 great rivers are fed. The Columbia, Snake. Frazier, McKenzie. Yukon. Col- 

 orado of the Pacific Slope, and the Mississippi with its Western tributaries, 



