The heat had opened the cones and the seedlings were growing up
in myriads; but not a conifer of any other kind could be seen as far
as the fire had reached.
In the Michigan Peninsula, northern Wisconsin and Minnesota, _P.
Banksiana_, a comparatively worthless tree, is replacing the valuable
red pine (_P. resinosa_), and in the Sierras _P. Murrayana_ and _P.
tuberculata_ are replacing the more valuable species by the same
process.
In this case, also, the worthless trees are the shortest lived. So we
see that nature is doing all that she can to remedy the evil. Man only
is reckless, and especially the American man. The Mexican will cut
large limbs off his trees for fuel, but will spare the tree. Even the
poor Indian, when at the starvation point, stripping the bark from the
yellow pine (_P. ponderosa_), for the mucilaginous matter being formed
into sap wood, will never take a strip wider than one third the
circumference of the tree, so that its growth may not be injured.
We often read that oaks are springing up in destroyed forests where
oaks had never grown before. The writers are no doubt sincere, but
they are careless. The only pine forests where oaks are not intermixed
are either in land so sandy that oaks cannot be made to grow on them
at all, or so far north that they are beyond their northern limit. In
the Green Mountains and in the New England forests, in the pine
forests in Pennsylvania, in the Adirondacks, in Wisconsin and
Michigan--except in sand--I have found oaks mixed with the pines and
spruces.
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