38 FOREST TREES OF CALIFORNIA. 



twice the seed, obliquely obovate and widest above. Many 

 of these trees in the closer forests are tall and slender, from 

 seventy-five to one hundred feet or more in hight, often 

 irregularly branched, but they arc always graceful and never 

 formal. On open borders, with greater freedom for develop- 

 ment, they are both grand and graceful — the finest of all the 

 spruces. The sturdy, elegant trunk, of rather even reddish- 

 brown bark, reminds one of the sugar pine; column often 

 clean from fifty to one hundred feet, and six to eight feet or 

 more in diameter, thence above branching into a broadened 

 conic top, duly balanced to lines of beauty up to one hundred 

 and fifty or even two hundred feet. The best types we have 

 witnessed are at the summit of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, 

 which certainly seemed, to our enchanted view, as though 

 they must be, for their style of beauty, equal to any spruce 

 in the known world. 



The special form and analytic illustrative figures in Vol. 

 VI of the U. S. R. R. Reports, are our own paintings. That 

 portion, however, showing the reflexed condition of the scales 

 is superadded to the original drawing and is not character- 

 istic. This condition of old cast off cones, exposed to a burn- 

 ing sun, is also common to other conifers, and is eminently 

 conspicuous in the cones of the Western Mountain Weymouth 

 Pine {P. Monticola), etc. — we simply note the fact in passing. 

 Typically, this tree is pyramidal, one hundred to one hun- 

 dred and fifty feet high and from two to four feet through; 

 but in high altitudes of California, say eight thousand to 

 ten thousand feet, is often only a shrub. In the north lati- 

 tude of the Cascades to near Crescent City, it comes down 

 almost to the coast in due form. 



DOUGLAS SPRUCE. 



(Pseudo-Tsuga [Abies] Douglasii.) 



"There is a quiet spirit in these woods." — Lonofeltow. 



DOUGLAS SPRUCE is found in great abundance in 

 California and Oregon — from coast to Rocky, Blue, 

 and Sierra Mountains — but does not climb the higher 

 and highest elevations, yet ranks among the grandest of the 

 lofty and exceedingly beautiful trees of the Pacific. This is 

 one of the first and best known trees of the far West ; discov- 

 ered by Menzies, at Xootka Sound in 1797, during the voyage 

 of Vancouver, afterwards by Douglas and truly identified, 



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