BOTANY. 
43 
south to the vicinity of the Columbia river. It is disseminated through nearly all parts of the 
Sierra Nevada within their limits, and is not rare in the coast ranges between San Francisco 
and the Umpqua river. It is also generally spread over the transverse ranges of mountains— 
Siskiyou, Umpqua, and Calapooya—which connect the Cascades and coast ranges ; and probably 
the finest trees of it which exist are in the vicinity of Humboldt hay and Hogue river, on the 
coast. 
I have never seen it anywhere existing in such numbers as of itself to form forests, hut 
generally occurring associated with other species which far surpass the sugar pines in numbers, 
while they, in turn, exceed all their fellows in dimensions. Scattered here and there through 
the forest, they seem, in their towering grandeur, like so many chiefs surrounded by their sub¬ 
jects and slaves. 
The sugar pine is closely allied, in all its botanical characters, to the white pine (P. strobus ) 
of the eastern States ; though like all the conifers of the Pacific coast, it exhibits a symmetry 
and perfection of figure, a healthfulness and vigor of growth, such as are perhaps not attained 
by the trees of any other part of the world. 
The young trees of the sugar pine give early promise of the majesty to which they subse¬ 
quently attain. They are unmistakably young giants, even when having a trunk with a 
diameter of a foot or more ; their remote and regularly whorled branches, like the stem, 
covered with smooth grayish-green bark, showing that, although so large, the plant is still 
“in the milk,” and has only began its life of many centuries. 
The mature tree is one of the most magnificent exhibitions of vegetable life that nature has 
produced; rising sometimes to an altitude of 300, and having a diameter of 20 feet, it is scarcely 
inferior to the Sequoias, the confessed monarch of the vegetable kingdom. It should be said, 
however, that it rarely attains such extreme dimensions. Where abundant, and the general 
growth vigorous, it is rare to find a tree more than 10 feet in diameter, and 200 feet in height* 
The sugar pine conspicuously exhibits one of the most general and striking characters of the 
Coniferce —the great development of the trunk at the expense of the branches. Nearly the 
whole growth of the root is thrown into the trunk, which generally stands without flaw or 
flexure, a perpendicular cone, all its transverse sections accurately circular ; sparsely set with 
branches, which in their insignificance seem like the festoons of ivy which wreath the columns 
of some ancient ruin. 
The foliage is less dense than that of many pines, the leaves in fives, 3 inches in length, and of 
a dark blue green color. As in P. strobus , toward the summit of the tree a few of the 
branches are frequently longer than those below, and suspended from the extremities of these, 
singly or in clusters, hang the cones. These are of a size commensurate with that of the tree, 
being sometimes 16 and even 18 inches in length by 4 inches diameter. More commonly they are 
12 to 14 inches in length by 3 inches in diameter. They bear a general resemblance to the cones 
of the white pine, still more to those of P. excelsa from the Himalayas. They are generally 
slightly curved, and are composed of densely imbricated thin scales, of which the exposed portion 
is rounded in outline and without spines. They are commonly less resinous than those of P. 
strobus. The wood of the sugar pine is very similar in character to that of the white pine ; 
white, soft, homogeneous, and usually straight grained. It is the most highly esteemed for 
inside work, of all the varieties of lumber found in California. 
At McCumber’s and Shingletown, in northern California, the saw-mills are set in what must 
be a lumberman’s paradise—a forest composed of trees of remarkable size, perfection, and 
