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Of the other conifers that are so happy as to have place here, there are three firs, three or four pines, two cypresses, a yew, and another spruce, the Abies Pattoniana . This last is perhaps the most beautiful of all the spruces, but, being comparatively small and growing only far back on the mountains, it receives but little attention from most people.
Of the conifers the species are as follows: yellow pine, pinus ponderosa; Jeffrey pine, pinus jeffreyi; sugar pine, pinus lambertiana; lodge-pole pine, pinus murrayana; white pine, pinus monticola; digger pine, pinus sabiniana; white-bark pine, pinus albicaulis; red fir, pseudotsuga taxifolia; white fir, abies concolor; Shasta fir, abies magnifica; patton hemlock or alpine spruce, tsuga pattoniana; incense cedar, libocedrus decurrens; western juniper, juniperus occidentalis; yew, taxus brevifolia.
At 8000 feet I met with pines, whose trunks I had seen strewing the river for some miles lower down: the first that occurred was Abies Brunoniana, a beautiful species, which forms a stately blunt pyramid, with branches spreading like the cedar, but not so stiff, and drooping gracefully on all sides.
The south-east slopes are clothed with Abies Brunoniana at 8000 feet elevation, and cleft by a deep ravine, from which projects what appears to be an old moraine, fully 1500 or perhaps 2000 feet high. Grassy flats of different levels, sprinkled with brushwood and scattered clumps of pine and maple, occupy the valley; whose west flanks rise in steep, rocky, and scantily wooded grassy slopes.
They may have fallen out of a decayed cone in the same way as often happens to the seeds of the spruce fir, Pinus abies, found scattered over the ground in our woods.
They are ordinarily called pyramidal or fastigiate forms, and as far as their history goes, they arise suddenly in large sowings of the normal species. The fastigiate birch was produced in this way by Baumann, the Abies concolor fastigiata by Thibault and Keteleer at Paris, the pyramidal cedar by Paillat, the analogous form of Wellingtonia by Otin.
Among them are the Scotch and spruce firs, Pinus sylvestris and Pinus abies, and the buckbean, or Menyanthes trifoliata, etc., besides the common birch and other European plants.
The substance from which spruce-beer is made, is an extract of the branches of the Abies Canadensis, or Hemlock Spruce; a similar preparation is obtained from the branches of Dacrydium, in the South Seas. Why, in the spring, is the herbage under trees generally more luxuriant than it is beyond the spread of their branches?
If it were certain that the abies of Caesar was the fir formerly and still found in peat-mosses, and that he was right in denying the existence of the beech in England in his time, the observation would be very important, because it would fix a date at which the fir had become extinct, and the beech had not yet appeared in the island.
Abies Webbiana begins here, and continues onwards, but, as on Tonglo, Mainom, and the other outer wetter Sikkim ranges, there is neither larch, Pinus excelsa, Abies Smithiana, or A. Brunoniana.
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