116 FOREST TREES OF CALIFORNIA. 



fifty feet high ; two to three feet, rarely five, in diameter. In 

 the larger specimens the rather insignificant branches give 

 it an air of devotion to body-timber, like the colossal Red- 

 wood (Sequoia sempervirens); but this is, to a great extent, 

 characteristic of nearly all the forest trees of North America; 

 only with the Larch and a few other intrinsically tower- 

 trees, perhaps a little more so. 



The trunk is strictly straight; in deep gorges, the clean 

 and handsome lower shaft is fifty to one hundred, or in 

 rare instances even two hundred feet, true as a plumb line; 

 consequently straight-grained, and, in respect to this tree, 

 free-splitting. Larch literature is very voluminous, and 

 the uses so manifold, universal, and supereminent that 

 time would fail to even touch the varied topics. Suffice to 

 say the timber is exceedingly tough, light, and elastic; in 

 river, ocean, harbor, earth, and air structures of the severest 

 trials, far excels the staple timbers of the world, such as oaks, 

 pines, etc. Unfortunately this species is never massed in 

 forests, nor thronged in swamps, like the Eastern Tamarack 

 (L. Americana). But our Larch loves a due degree of sun- 

 light, pure refreshing air, sweet percolating soil; dry above, 

 so that no night evaporation ever suddenly chills, and where 

 the genial currents of air are swelled and lifted up at night 

 from free, broad, and contiguous vales that share their 

 bounty with the little valleys between, neither arid nor 

 foggy, abounding with moisture beneath, fed by living 

 fountains, or established beside rapid rivulets that keep 

 moisture continually in motion, ever laving lower rootlets, 

 but never drowned beneath floods of wintery rains, nor 

 parched by droughts of burning Summers. But let us return 

 and review her specific characteristics a little more in detail. 

 Little needle-like leaves, long, relative to other species, and 

 very slender, even delicate, radiating in spangles fasciculoid 

 from bud-like rudiments of twigs; potentially designed as 

 such, but apparently falling short in the realization. Thus 

 we see these very narrowly life-like leaves weak and softly 

 starry, light and airy, as it were, verging well nigh upon 

 the unsubstantial, pale bluish-green (closely inspected, 

 slightly keeled above and below); thickened and massed, as 

 thej' sometimes are, near the middle of the tree, the softened 

 effect is like that of the Great Swamp Cypress (Cypressus 

 clisticha). Seen in Spring, decked in pink tassels, like ripe 

 strawberries thrown over the lofty pea-green cone of delicate 

 foliage — if anything so gauzy or gossamery is entitled to the 

 dignified appellation of foliage, in any ordinary sense of the 

 word; but there she stands before you in singular beauty, 

 the veiled Venus of the grove, basking in early Spring and 

 Summer, loveliest of the lawn. Albeit, later on, as the sea- 

 son advances towards Autumn, the foliage becomes more 



