nce
to further operations, and, of course, most of the seedlings and
saplings are destroyed.

These mill ravages, however, are small as compared with the
comprehensive destruction caused by "sheepmen." Incredible numbers of
sheep are driven to the mountain pastures every summer, and their course
is ever marked by desolation. Every wild garden is trodden down, the
shrubs are stripped of leaves as if devoured by locusts, and the woods
are burned. Running fires are set everywhere, with a view to clearing
the ground of prostrate trunks, to facilitate the movements of the
flocks and improve the pastures. The entire forest belt is thus swept
and devastated from one extremity of the range to the other, and, with
the exception of the resinous _Pinus contorta_, Sequoia suffers
most of all. Indians burn off the underbrush in certain localities to
facilitate deer-hunting, mountaineers and lumbermen carelessly allow
their camp-fires to run; but the fires of the sheepmen, or
_muttoneers_, form more than ninety per cent. of all destructive
fires that range the Sierra forests.

It appears, therefore, that notwithstanding our forest king might live
on gloriously in Nature's keeping, it is rapidly vanishing before the
fire and steel of man; and unless protective measures be speedily
invented and applied, in a few decades, at the farthest, all that will be
left of _Sequoia gigantea_ will be a few hacked and scarred
monuments.

TWO-LEAVED, OR TAMARACK, PINE
(_Pinus contorta_, var._Marrayana_)

This species forms the bulk of the alpine forests, extending along the
range, above the fir zone, up to a height of from 8000 to 9500 feet
above the sea, growing in beautiful order upon moraines that are
scarcely changed as yet by post-glacial weathering. Compared with the
giants of the lower zones, this is a small tree, seldom attaining a
height of a hundred feet. The largest specimen I ever measured was
ninety feet in height, and a little over six in diameter four feet from
the ground. The average height of mature trees throughout the entire
belt is probably not far from fifty or sixty feet, with a diameter of
two feet. It is a well-proportioned, rather handsome little pine, with
grayish-brown bark, and crooked, much-divided branches, which cover the
greater portion of the trunk, not so densely, however, as to prevent its
being seen. The lower limbs curve downward, gradually take a horizontal
position about half-way up the trunk, then aspi