DISTKIJ5UTI0N OF THE TKEES. 



19 



now very little merchantable timber of this kind left on it. West 

 of this body it occurred in Beaufort, Craven and Pitt counties, 

 only thinly dispersed among the loblolly pines as far as Kinston in 

 Lenoir county, where on a suitable soil it again became the domi- 

 nant forest tree, extending west as far as Entield, and nearly 

 to Raleigh. On the maritime sand hills just within the sounds 

 there was a narrow belt in Currituck county, and in Carteret a 

 wider belt in the middle of the county, lying north and south, 

 parallel to the coast. In Currituck it is now confined to the south- 

 ern promontory which projects into Albemarle sound, and in Car- 

 teret there are only several million feet of mill timber on the sand 

 ridges opposite Bogue sound. From Carteret southward there was 

 some uniformity as to its manner of occurrence. It occupied a 

 belt from two to twenty miles wide immediately on the coast; 

 beyond that lay a poorly drained basin of variable width and 

 broken contiguity, embracing oak flats and gum and cypress 

 swamps. The long-leaf pine re-appeared west of this and extended 

 in an unmixed forest, broken only by river swamp, streams and 

 occasional "juniper bays," to its western limits at Cary to ten miles 

 west of Troy, and to Lilesville in Anson county. It is in this 

 stretch of country that the largest areas lie which are either par- 

 tially or completely denuded of all valuable tree growth and where 

 a future growth is being entirely kept down by the systematic burn- 

 ings to which those lands are subjected. 



South of North Carolina the long-leaf pine extends through 

 Eastern South Carolina and Georgia, Southern Alabama and Mis- 

 sissippi, and west of the Mississippi river it re-appears in the sandy 

 uplands of the valleys of the Red and Sabine rivers in Louisiana 

 and easfern Texas, where it reaches its greatest development. 



The quality of the wood of this pine varies considerably with 

 the character of the soil on which it grows. Where the humus 

 covering on the soil is thin, and the sand very deep, the tree has a 

 coarser grain and a larger proportion of sap than where there is 

 more organic matter in the soil, and it is not so highly silicious. 

 The stocks with the coarser grain and larger amount of sap wood 

 are distinguished as pitcli pine, those with the finer grain and less 

 sap wood as heart ov yellow pine. The pitcJi pine yields turpentine 



