62 FOREST TREES OF CALIFORNIA. 



orange, olive, and vineyards, and fruits and fields in general, 

 may yet be found to require them, for they retain, distribute, 

 and precipitate humidity, and thence springs and streams 

 are maintained for all the indispensable wants of life. A 

 wiser generation may yet find and apply the ways and means 

 in the light of a genuine public policy, which will be known 

 and recognized, in very deed, to be of the utmost importance 

 to the welfare of every settler and citizen of the State. A 

 people wont to set at naught nature's laws, are doomed by 

 their own acts to ruin — extinction — and must soon give place 

 to a nation working right-use-ness. They render possible 

 general and varied culture, adequate to human wants, to 

 secure an ever ensured prosperity: not simply measured by 

 the common standard of more manifest and merely utilita- 

 rian wealth, they are indeed the great continental lungs of 

 the wide world, purifying and vivifying its litoral veiny 

 streams, for are we not rapidly acquiring knowledge of serial 

 currents and laws conforming thereto, and applying them to 

 human requisites? They confessedly oxygenate and osmose 

 the air on which man subsists, more than upon food, drink, 

 clothing, habitation, and all the mechanical, industrial, and 

 social arts or economics combined. But who shall be able 

 to tell all their uses? Let us learn to love them, inspire 

 their exhilarating ethers, expatiate in their glory and their 

 beauty, wisely enjoy their use, honor and revere these natu- 

 ral types of grandeur and of glory — real and ideal : maintain 

 their integrity unimpaired, but rather in multiplying, mul- 

 tiply and replenish the high places of the Pacific, and pass 

 them on as living monuments of ancestral wisdom, from 

 generation to generation. 



KNOBBY CONE PINE. 



(Pinus tubereulata.) 



"Low stirrings in the leaves, before the wind, 

 Wakes all the green strings of the forest lyre." 



— Loiccll. 



THE Knobby Pine is a lofty tree of much beauty, from 

 seventy-five to one hundred feet high, by three to four 

 feet in diameter, in the northern interior of the State, 

 chiefly in the vicinity of Mount Shasta — east, south, west, 

 and north — and also extends along the Sierras southward. 

 Here it forms stately trees, often uprightly branching towards 



