tion for 450
miles, at an elevation of from 5000 to nearly 9000 feet above the sea.
In its youth _A. concolor_ is a charmingly symmetrical tree with
branches regularly whorled in level collars around its whitish-gray
axis, which terminates in a strong, hopeful shoot. The leaves are in two
horizontal rows, along branchlets that commonly are less than eight
years old, forming handsome plumes, pinnated like the fronds of ferns.
The cones are grayish-green when ripe, cylindrical, about from three to
four inches long by one and a half to two inches wide, and stand upright
on the upper branches.

Full-grown trees, favorably situated as to soil and exposure, are about
200 feet high, and five or six feet in diameter near the ground, though
larger specimens are by no means rare.

As old age creeps on, the bark becomes rougher and grayer, the branches
lose their exact regularity, many are snow-bent or broken off, and the
main axis often becomes double or otherwise irregular from accidents to
the terminal bud or shoot; but throughout all the vicissitudes of its
life on the mountains, come what may, the noble grandeur of the species
is patent to every eye.

MAGNIFICENT SILVER FIR, OR RED FIR
(_Abies magnifica_)

This is the most charmingly symmetrical of all the giants of the Sierra
woods, far surpassing its companion species in this respect, and easily
distinguished from it by the purplish-red bark, which is also more
closely furrowed than that of the white, and by its larger cones, more
regularly whorled and fronded branches, and by its leaves, which are
shorter, and grow all around the branchlets and point upward.

In size, these two Silver Firs are about equal, the _magnifica_
perhaps a little the taller. Specimens from 200 to 250 feet high are not
rare on well-ground moraine soil, at an elevation of from 7500 to 8500
feet above sea-level. The largest that I measured stands back three
miles from the brink of the north wall of Yosemite Valley. Fifteen years
ago it was 240 feet high, with a diameter of a little more than five
feet.

Happy the man with the freedom and the love to climb one of these superb
trees in full flower and fruit. How admirable the forest-work of Nature
is then seen to be, as one makes his way up through the midst of the
broad, fronded branches, all arranged in exquisite order around the
trunk, like the whorled leaves of lilies, and each branch and branchlet
about as strictly pinnate as the most sy