TIMBEE OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA 77 
pine up to 100 years of age, and the timber is rather 
heavier and stronger, the heartwood is reddish brown, 
sapwood yellowish white, and there is often a good deal of 
it. It is extensively used for beams, flooring, ceilings, and 
building work generally, also for railway sleepers, and the 
smaller trees for pit props. Sugar and yellow pine form 
nearly half of the timber output of California at the 
present time, redwood nearly the other half. Western 
yellow pine is very resinous, but less so and lighter than 
the southern yellow pines. The resinous smell of the wood 
is very remarkable (Fig. 16). 
Weight about 32 lbs. per cubic foot. 
Douglas Fir or Oregon Pine {Pseudo-tsvga Douglasii), Fig. 
17, also known as Douglas spruce, yellow or white fir, and 
red fir, is really neither a pine nor a fir ; it is generally 
known to the trade as Oregon, and it is sometimes said 
that Douglas fir is the better timber. They are really the 
same, although, as is often the case, the timber from one 
locality is better than that from another.^ It is the chief 
tree of Washington and Oregon, and the most abundant 
and most valuable in British Columbia, where it attains its 
greatest size ; in Vancouver Island, or along the shores 
and along the river valleys near the coast on the mainland, 
trees of 300 ft. in height are not rare. This timber is 
shipped from San Francisco and other Pacific ports ; it 
ranks third in order of timber-producing trees of the United 
States,^ has nearly trebled its output from 1899 to 1905, and 
the output will doubtless soon exceed that of the pine of 
the southern States. 
1 There are two kinds of Douglas fir recognised, one called "red 
fir," although it is not really a fir, and which is the timber usually 
imported into Great Britain, and the other called " white fir," and is 
strictly a fir, but is not such a good timber for general purposes. 
2 In 1906 statistics it ranks second, and white pine third. 
