THE DOUGLAS FIR. 
Pseudotsu'ga Dougia'sii Carr. 
FEw men assuredly are commemorated by more last- 
ing monuments than the Cherokee Sequoia and the 
Scottish botanical collector David Douglas. The 
latter was the son of a working mason at Scone, 
Perthshire, and was early apprenticed in Lord Mans- 
field’s gardens at Scone Palace. Douglas was subse- 
quently employed in the Glasgow Botanic Gardens, 
and in 1823, on the recommendation of Sir William 
Hooker, was sent out to the United States as collector 
by the Royal Horticultural Society. In the following 
year he landed at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia 
River and worked southward, re-discovering the tree 
which now bears his name in 1826, and bringing it 
home when, in 1827, he crossed the Rocky Mountains 
to Hudson’s Bay, where he met Franklin, Back, and 
Richardson returning from their overland Arctic 
voyage. Sent out again in 1829, he explored Cali- 
fornia and the Fraser River, and in 1832 and 1833 
visited the Sandwich Islands, where in 1834 he met 
his death. Falling accidentally into one of the pits 
which the natives were in the habit of digging as 
traps for wild cattle, he was gored and trampled to 
death by an infuriated bull. 
Many as were the novelties which the ill-fated 
Douglas introduced into our gardens, the Douglas Fir 
was not exactly one of them. It had been originally 
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