PINS. 57 



diet, we have watched the Indian go forth a day's journey to 

 procure meat, taking neither how and arrow, gun, nor any 

 other weapon nor trap, and yet return in t he evening laden 

 with hooty. The reader may he curious to know one of his 

 ways and means, e.g.: Provided with a few pine-nuts, as 

 usual; finding squirrel haunts, he raises one edge of a flat 

 stone upon another, propping it up with one of his "pinons" 

 set endwise ; Mr. squirrel gnaws one side, weakening the sup- 

 port, when down comes suddenly the dead-fall and secures 

 him, and so at eve, passing from stone to stone, the long 

 string of fat squirrels is no longer a mystery. 



So much confusion has hitherto arisen by mistaking this 

 pine, in numberless ways, up to a recent date, that we may 

 be indulged in a few details and reviews, especially of the 

 more striking contrasts: First, it is oftenest mistaken for the 

 Greatest Coned Coulter Pine (P. Coulteri) of the coast, but that 

 is a cling and close-coned pine ; this Gray Pine is loose, opens 

 and sheds out its large cylindroid seeds so soon as ripe, and 

 for the most part forthwith falls away; is darker mahogany- 

 brown, shorter, and relative to length, broader ; shaped more 

 like the old fashioned beehive. Whereas, Coulter's is of 

 lighter color, raw umber-tint and oblong, say about one third 

 longer; the hooks of the scales larger and longer, some often 

 two to three inches long, Sabin's being shorter and more flat- 

 tened ; seed-wings of Coulter's dark-brown, almost black like 

 the seed itself, besides it is obliquely obtuse, four or five times 

 as long and large, and yet the seed itself is much smaller, one 

 third to one half the size, somewhat flattened and triangu- 

 loid. In Coulter's, also, the leaf-straw is much larger and 

 longer, bigger and longer boots, club-footed, more manifestly 

 scaly, scales fringed or eyelashed at the tips ; the lighter 

 colored leafage has very little of that delicate blush of sky- 

 blue; in short, the whole aspect of the tree is distinct at all 

 stages and in all conditions of growth, from top to toe. It 

 seems almost a loss of time and valuable space to enter into 

 a fuller review of what a tree is not, when there is so much 

 to be said or written of what it positively is. But why we 

 should still continue to copy old errors in topograph} 7 is not 

 so easily accounted for, since all the world observes, or is 

 presumed to observe, them along the great continental 

 thoroughfare of the Central Pacific Railroad. 



This Hooked Bull Pine, as the pastoral herder has it, for he 

 sees bovine horns in the hooks, is said to have been first 

 found " on the Cordilleras of California at a very high eleva- 

 tion, one thousand six hundred feet below the region of per- 

 petual snow," afterwards nearer the seacoast lower, " but 

 almost invariably on the summit of high elevations on the 

 mountains," etc. Now the fact is, this is emphatically a foot- 

 hill pine, some say as low as tide-water ; but we will say two 

 8 



