ounger
branches that they cannot well be handled without gloves. The timber is
tough, close-grained, white, and looks more like pine than any other of
the spruces. It splits freely, makes excellent shingles and in general
use in house-building takes the place of pine. I have seen logs of this
species a hundred feet long and two feet in diameter at the upper end.
It was named in honor of the old Scotch botanist Archibald Menzies, who
came to this coast with Vancouver in 1792 [23].

The beautiful hemlock spruce with its warm yellow-green foliage is
also common in some portions of these woods. It is tall and slender and
exceedingly graceful in habit before old age comes on, but the timber is
inferior and is seldom used for any other than the roughest work, such
as wharf-building.

The Western arbor-vitae [24] (Thuja gigantea) grows to a size truly
gigantic on low rich ground. Specimens ten feet in diameter and a
hundred and forty feet high are not at all rare. Some that I have heard
of are said to be fifteen and even eighteen feet thick. Clad in rich,
glossy plumes, with gray lichens covering their smooth, tapering boles,
perfect trees of this species are truly noble objects and well worthy
the place they hold in these glorious forests. It is of this tree that
the Indians make their fine canoes.

Of the other conifers that are so happy as to have place here, there
are three firs, three or four pines, two cypresses, a yew, and another
spruce, the Abies Pattoniana [25]. This last is perhaps the most
beautiful of all the spruces, but, being comparatively small and growing
only far back on the mountains, it receives but little attention from
most people. Nor is there room in a work like this for anything like a
complete description of it, or of the others I have just mentioned. Of
the three firs, one (Picea grandis) [26], grows near the coast and is
one of the largest trees in the forest, sometimes attaining a height of
two hundred and fifty feet. The timber, however, is inferior in quality
and not much sought after while so much that is better is within reach.
One of the others (P. amabilis, var. nobilis) forms magnificent forests
by itself at a height of about three thousand to four thousand feet
above the sea. The rich plushy, plumelike branches grow in regular
whorls around the trunk, and on the topmost whorls, standing erect, are
the large, beautiful cones. This is far the most beautiful of all the
firs. In the Sierra