114 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 forests 
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, 
