PAST CONDITIONS. 11 



admixture. The hardwoods were represented by trees of all 

 sizes, from the seedling or sprout to the mature timber tree. 

 They formed nearly all of the undergrowth and this hardwood 

 forest showed every indication of thrift and permanence. 

 The white pine (red or Norway pine did not grow on these loam 

 lands) and hemlock were represented almost entirely by mature, 

 old timber, standing isolated among the hardwoods, or at most 

 growing in groups or small bodies. Saplings, bushy young trees, 

 and seedlings, were comparatively scarce. Active reproduction 

 was evidently not going on, and there is every reason to believe 

 that both pine and hemlock were losers in a long-fought strug- 

 gle for possession of the ground, in which a change in the gen- 

 eral conditions of moisture probably had something to do with 

 their defeat. As regards white pine this was most conspicuous 

 in the southern counties and on the heaviest soils (Marathon, 

 Langlade, and Dunn counties), where in many places the hard- 

 woods had succeeded in crowding out the pine entirely, but 

 wherever sand or gravel discouraged the hardwoods (Wood, 

 Barron, Price and Sawyer counties), the pine held more nearly 

 its own, and formed a fair proportion of the sapling timber. 



The thinly scattered balsam and the less frequent spruce ap- 

 pear to be in the same position as the pine and hemlock, but 

 they were much less important trees and naturally their sparse- 

 ness was less conspicuous. 



In the regular pinery of the sandy soils the pines predomi- 

 nated, the hemlock was entirely wanting and the hardwoods 

 were scantily represented by small white birch, aspen, and maple, 

 which were mixed with the young pine. In the dense stands 

 ■of mature timber these deciduous trees were killed out but reap- 

 peared where the superannuated pines were dying off and the 

 ■cover of their shading crowns was broken. (Oneida, Vilas, 

 Marinette, and Bayfield counties.) 



On the better loamy sands the pine forest was a mixture of 

 white and red (Norway) pine, with occasional patches (perhaps 

 temporary) of jack pine (Vilas, Oneida counties) but on the 

 poorer sands the red (Norway) and jack pine often stood alone 



