shapes. Upon
them, in after ages, were born the first hardwoods of America--perhaps
those of Europe, too--and upon them to-day the last great hardwood
forests of our country stand in primeval majesty, mutely awaiting their
imminent doom.

The richness of the Great Smoky forest has been the wonder and the
admiration of everyone who has traversed it. As one climbs from the
river to one of the main peaks, he passes successively through the same
floral zones he would encounter in traveling from mid-Georgia to
southern Canada.

Starting amid sycamores, elms, gums, willows, persimmons, chinquapins,
he soon enters a region of beech, birch, basswood, magnolia, cucumber,
butternut, holly, sourwood, box elder, ash, maple, buckeye, poplar,
hemlock, and a great number of other growths along the creeks and
branches. On the lower slopes are many species of oaks, with hickory,
hemlock, pitch pine, locust, dogwood, chestnut. In this region nearly
all trees attain their fullest development. On north fronts of hills the
oaks reach a diameter of five to six feet. In cool, rich coves, chestnut
trees grow from six to nine feet across the stump; and tulip poplars up
to ten or eleven feet, their straight trunks towering like gigantic
columns, with scarcely a noticeable taper, seventy or eighty feet to the
nearest limb.

Ascending above the zone of 3,000 feet, white oak is replaced by the no
less valuable "mountain oak." Beech, birch, buckeye, and chestnut
persist to 5,000 feet. Then, where the beeches dwindle until adult trees
are only knee-high, there begins a sub-arctic zone of black spruce,
balsam, striped maple, aspen and the "Peruvian" or red cherry.

I have named only a few of the prevailing growths. Nowhere else in the
temperate zone is there such a variety of merchantable timber as in
western Carolina and the Tennessee front of the Unaka system. About a
hundred and twenty species of native trees grow in the Smoky Forest
itself. When Asa Gray visited the North Carolina mountains he
identified, in a thirty-mile trip, a greater variety of indigenous trees
than could be observed in crossing Europe from England to Turkey, or in
a trip from Boston to the Rocky Mountain plateau. As John Muir has said,
our forests, "however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to
God; for they were the best He ever planted."

The undergrowth is of almost tropical luxuriance and variety. Botanists
say that this is the richest collecting groun