ng their seeds. I have seen acorns and nuts germinating in
clusters on burned lands in a few instances. They had evidently been
buried there by animals and had escaped the fires. I have seen the red
cherry (_Prunus Pennsylvanica_) coming up in great quantities where
they might never have germinated had not the fires destroyed the
debris which covered the seed too deeply.

A careful examination around the margin of a burned forest will show
the trees of surrounding kinds working in again. Thus by the time the
short-lived aspens (and they are very short-lived on high land) have
made a covering on the burned land, the surrounding kinds will be
found re-established in the new forest, the seeds of the conifers,
carried in by the winds, the berries by the birds, the nuts and acorns
by the squirrels, the mixture varying more or less from the kinds
which grew there before the fire.

It is wonderful how far the seeds of berries are carried by birds. The
waxwings and cedar birds carry seeds of our tartarean honeysuckles,
purple barberries and many other kinds four miles distant, where we
see them spring up on the lake shore, where these birds fly in flocks
to feed on the juniper berries. It seems to be the same everywhere. I
found European mountain ash trees last summer in a forest in New
Hampshire; the seed must have been carried over two miles as the crow
flies.

While this alternation is going on in the East, and may have been
going on for thousands of years, the Rocky Mountain district is not so
fortunate. When a forest is burned down in that dry region, it is
doubtful if coniferous trees will ever grow again, except in some
localities specially favored. I have seen localities where short-lived
trees were dying out and no others taking their places. Such spots
will hereafter take their places above the timber line, which seems to
me to be a line governed by circumstances more than by altitude or
quality of soil.

There are a few exceptions where pines will succeed pines in a
burned-down forest. _Pinus Murrayana_ grows up near the timber line in
the Rocky Mountains. This tree has persistent cones which adhere to
the trees for many years. I have counted the cones of sixteen years on
one of these trees, and examined burned forests of this species, where
many of the cones had apparently been bedded in the earth as the trees
fell. The heat had opened the cones and the seedlings were growing up
in myriads; but not a conifer of