THE DOUGLAS FIR 99 
by the well-known flagstaff in Kew Gardens. The 
wood now comes to market in clean, straight spars, 
forty to 110 feet in length and nine to thirty-two 
inches in diameter. These as a rule show no sign of 
branches, and are singularly free from the knots that 
mark the loss of them. The flagstaff or spar at Kew 
was felled in British Columbia, and was presented 
to Kew in 1861. It is 159 feet long, the tree from 
which it was made having been 180 feet high, and 
having about 250 annual rings, averaging eleven rings 
to each inch of its radius. It tapers from a dia- 
meter of twenty-two inches to one of eight inches, 
and weighs about three tons. British grown speci- 
mens on the other hand, twenty-five years old, have. 
averaged only three rings per inch of radius. 
The Douglas Fir is the most widely distributed 
of all American trees, extending over no less than 
thirty-two degrees of latitude, from 55° N. near Lake 
Tacla in British Columbia to the neighbourhood of 
San Luis Potosi, in Mexico. It thus possesses a con- 
stitution, as Professor Sargent says, that 
‘enables it to endure the fierce gales and long winters of the north, 
and the nearly perpetual sunshine of the Mexican Cordilleras, to 
thrive in the rain and fog which sweep almost continuously along 
the Pacific coast range, and on the arid mountain slopes of the 
interior, where for months every year rain never falls.” 
It reaches its greatest dimensions, however, in the 
humid lowlands of southern British Columbia, Van- 
couver Island, Western Washington, and Oregon, 
especially round the shores of Puget Sound, and on 
the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, where there is 
an abundant rainfall from the Pacific. Here it attains 
