v } v 
" I 
IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 21 
permissible to build fires; so that between the hungry tramping cows, 
and the careless pleasure-seeking multitude, the trees, already weary 
with age-long struggle against adverse conditions, are likely presently 
to succumb. 
The second species named, Gowen’s cypress, is a shrub or low tree, 
perhaps twenty feet high at the maximum and in this locality occupying 
an even more restricted range than C. macrocarp®. The little trees cling 
to a southwestern exposure, on the east side of a little valley called at 
length Saw-mill gulch. The total extent of the original limits of the 
colony does not exceed forty rods in length and three or four in width ! 
I say the original limits, because, by reason of a fire which swept the 
hillside some ten years since, the boundaries of the grove have been 
somewhat extended. In that forest fire, many of the older cypresses 
and nearly all associated pines, chinquapins and other shrubby vege- 
tation, perished. Seedling cypresses, have had for a time therefore, 
a wider field for occupancy, and thousands of crowded slender young 
trees about ten feet high occupy in large part the original territory and 
extend in solid phalanx here and there a little beyond. Scattered seed- 
lings also to-day may be found many rods to the northeast of the grove, 
standing in the company of the Bishop pine, showing that wide distribu- 
tion is not here determined by any lack of ability of the seeds to travel. 
As noted later, the young trees are fruitful at an astonishingly early 
age, about two or three years, if I correctly estimate from data at hand ; 
but a rival in this regard is the Bishop pine which seems almost equally 
precocious. Whether this precocity is in form rather than function, is 
yet an open question. It is possible that seeds of such youthful par- 
entage may not be viable. But however this may be, the plant offers 
another factor in the problem of perpetuity equally surprising: these 
little trees simply exhaust themselves in the matter of inflorescence. 
As I saw them on February first many of the trees were so covered with 
pollen as to be yellow as gold from top to bottom. The species is monoe- 
cious, but with a tendency to dioecism. Some trees accordingly were 
simply burdened with pollen, while others showed an equally marvellous 
number of cones, cones generally at the ends of twig-like branches ; 
occasionally single or scattered ; more commonly densely clustered. Since 
the cones in evidence were already a year or more old, it is possible that 
during the time of their development the energy of the plant is so con- 
sumed, and little pollen on such trees accordingly appears. On a tree 
a foot high were two apparently mature cones, each about an incli in 
diameter ; but on the same tree were a few fertile cones just opening and 
one or two small sprays dusty with pollen. 
