136 B. Lt. Fernow—The Battle of the Forest. 
Thus the alterations of forest-growth take place, oak following 
pine or pine following oak; the poplar, birch and cherry appear- 
ing on the sunny burns, or the hickory, beech and maple creep- 
ing into the shadier pine growths. While in the eastern forest 
under naturai conditions the rotation of power is accomplished 
in at least from 300 to 500 years, the old monarchs of the Pacific, 
towering above all competitors, have held sway 2,000 or more 
years. In this warfare, with changes in climatic and soil con- 
ditions going on at the same time, it may well occur that a whole 
race may even be exterminated. 
I have dwelt thus long upon the formative period of the forest 
in order to make you realize that the virgin forest is a product 
of long struggles, extending over centuries, nay, thousands of 
years. Some of the mightiest representatives of old families, 
which at one time of prehistoric date were powerful, still survive, 
but are gradually succumbing to their fate in our era. 
The largest of our eastern forest trees, reaching a height of 
140 feet and diameters up to 12 feet, the most beautiful and one 
of the most useful, the tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera), is a 
survivor of an early era once widely distributed, but now con- 
fined to eastern North America, and doomed to vanish soon 
from our woods through man’s improper partisanship. 
Others, like the TYorreya and Cupressus, seem to haye suc- 
cumbed to a natural decadence, if we may judge from their 
confined limits of distribution. So, too, the colossal sequoias, 
remnants of an age when things generally were of larger size 
than now, appear to be near the end of their reign, while the 
mighty taxodium or bald cypress, the big tree of the east, still 
seems vigorous and prosperous, being able to live with wet feet 
without harm to its constitution, weird with the gray tillandsia 
or Spanish moss. 
Having thus scanned through the traditions of unwritten his- 
tory of the battle of the forest, having seen some of the com- 
batants in the struggle and learned something of their methods 
of conquering the earth and each other, we may take a look at 
the condition of things on the North American continent as it 
presumably was in the beginning of historic times or within 
our century. 
As far as occupancy of the soil by the forest is concerned, we 
find that the struggle had not yet been determined in its fayor 
