Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/376

372 from the coast westward to beyond the Great Lakes. A goodly number of other trees mingle with the pines in this northern portion of the Atlantic forest—basswood, elm, birch, sugar maple and ash among the broad-leaved species, and the black spruce, hemlock and cedar among conifers, but the pine everywhere gives the broadest and most pronounced feature to the woodland. This northern pine forest follows the highest ridges of the Alleghanies quite to their southern limits, conspicuous in the mountain landscape as an evergreen belt—the hemlock (or what is left of its once grand forests after the axe of the lumberman and "bark-peeler") predominating in certain districts.

Somewhere in the mid-New England region, and in New York along the watershed of the St. Lawrence, one who travels with an eye for trees will notice the ever-increasing number and variety of broad-leaved species toward the south. Among the scattered pines appears the massy leafage of oaks, hickories, chestnuts, beeches and other hardwoods, which denotes a borderland in tree life—the northern edge of that vast deciduous forest the summer canopy of which, in aboriginal times, covered the Ohio and Mississippi basins and the Piedmont land of the Atlantic seaboard to beyond the valley of the Delaware. Even to-day there are wide areas still covered by remnants of this magnificent interior forest of the continent. And what a wealth of species! Nowhere in the temperate zone may we find such an assemblage of splendid tree forms save possibly in eastern Asia. The tall tulip tree with its gorgeous blossoms and broad leaves of shining green; the array of magnolias, rivaled in beauty and variety only in the Chinese region; the gums (both tupelos and liquidambar); the flowering dogwood; the buckeyes, locusts, catalpas, beeches, plane trees, chestnuts, ashes, elms, cherries, a great variety of hawthorns, the hackberry, persimmon and sassafras; the hickories, walnuts and butternuts; the basswood, maple and sourwood; the hornbeams, and upwards of twenty species of oaks, not to mention a host of other less familiar trees and underwoods. This is the forest that nature would spread over the land again should the white man cease in his toilsome civilization. Those of us born with a love for the woods can only regret the loss and cling the more tenaciously to every woodland tract that happily we may still have the right to protect.

On the coast plain of the southern Atlantic region another form of tree-life gives character to the forest. Here the long-leaf pine and other allied species find a congenial home, the monotonous "piney woods" covering wide tracts of level, sandy country. From the earliest times tar and turpentine have given local color to the commerce of the region where this pine abounds. In low-lying swamp districts and along river shores the bald cypress, with its curious "knees" lifted above the submerging flood, is a conspicuous tree in the landscape and entirely peculiar to this Atlantic coast region.