178 The Douglas Fir. 



on the middle western slopes of the northern Sierra Nevada, the- 

 Douglas Fir often rises, in the course of five or six hundred years, to 

 the height of three hundred feet, and forms a trunk ten or twelve 

 feet in diameter above its enlarged base. The bark, which, like that 

 of the Hemlocks, contains a considerable amount of tannin, is 

 thick, deeply furrowed, and dark brown or red, or sometimes gray, 

 in certain situations. Young trees, like young Spruces and Firs, are 

 pyramidal in form, and retain their lower branches for a consider- 

 able time, sometimes even for two or three hundred years, when the 

 individual finds sufficient space for their lateral growth, as it does 

 occasionally when it has stood on the margin of the forest or on the 

 steep slopes of some mountain canon. Usually, however, the trees 

 stand close together, especially in those parts of the country in 

 which, under the favoring influences of a heavy rainfall, they grow 

 to the largest size, and then their great trunks tower upward, for a 

 hundred feet or more, without a branch. The leaves are linear and 

 generally obtuse, an inch or an inch and a quarter long, dark green 

 and very abundant, covering the long, slender, graceful branchlets. 

 The flowers of the Douglas Fir are produced from the axils of the 

 leaves of the previous year, the males surrounded by conspicuous 

 bud-scales, the females much shorter than their uarrow bracts. The 

 cones, which are subcylindrical, ripen the first year, and vary in 

 length from two to four inches. The seeds are triangular, convex, 

 and red on the upper side, flat, and nearly white on the lower side, 

 with shoit wings, broad at the base and acute at the apex. 



The Douglas Fir extends from latitude fifty-five north, where it 

 is found in the coast ranges and on the interior plateau of British 

 Columbia, southward through all the regions west of the Cascade 

 and the Sierra Nevada Mountains to Southern California. It is 

 abundant in the Rocky Mountains from British Columbia far into 

 Mexico, extending eastward to their eastern slopes in Montana, 

 Wyoming, Colorado and Texas ; it is common on the Wahsatch and 

 Uintah Mountains in Utah, but is unknown ou the ranges of the 

 great basin and on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada. It is 

 most abundant and reaches its greatest size on the low glacial plain 

 which surrounds the shores of Puget Sound. Here the Douglas Fir 

 can be seen in all its majesty. It is the most common tree in a forest 

 in which trees stand so close together that the traveler can barely 

 push his way between their mighty trunks which support far above 

 his head a canopy so dense that the rays of the sun never pierce 

 it. Through these dark and awful shades the most thoughtless man 

 cannot pass without experiencing that sense of solemnity and awe 

 with which the human mind is impressed when confronted by Nature 

 in her grandest manifestations. 



The Douglas Fir grows almost as large on some of the California 

 mountain-slopes as on the shores of Puget Sound, and it is one of the 

 remarkable things about this tree that it flourishes at the sea-level 



