The Forests of the Yosemite Park.

492 The Perplexities of a College President. The Forests of the Yosemite Park. 493 of our colleges and universities to-day is such that the president is easily overridden in all these matters by any faculty committee into whose hands work that is properly executive is generally committed. The result of all this is the present only too general attempt to build a comfortable house on a six-by-nine foundation, to secure satisfactory technical training with narrow and insufficient preparation, to attempt to establish university methods with students whose preparation to work under such methods has been little more than academic, and really not quite that. Out of all this says a university president, in a recent report, has come a certain resulting irritation on the part of many instructors which is certainly deplorable — even though possibly natural. Men who are specialists, or who more than anything else desire to become specialists, and who find their greatest delight and interest in research and investigation, will necessarily turn back to the work of definite and more elementary instruction with great reluctance, with a certain in- aptness born of the very conditions under which their work is carried, and with a very definite inrpatience (though this is not often recognized by themselves). Naturally, with such men, and under such conditions, it is easier to \u27 weed out\u27 men, to \u27 condition\u27 or \u27 flunk\u27 men, to \u27turn down\u27 men, than it is to patiently and successfully instruct and educate men. The avoidance of this alternate of instruction is easily, though perhaps unconsciously, disguised under the statement that it is necessai\u27y to have and to maintain high standards of excellence, — a statement made far more often by unsuccessful instructors than by those who are really competent to teach. Many conferences with graduates and with ex-students, and a careful study of the records of the different departments in this university and of the relations existing between teachers and taught, assure me that a gross injustice has been done to literally hundreds of bright students under the methods to which reference has just been made. Our new president must face all this with his hands practically tied. He sees clearly what ought to be done ; he knows that his thought is entirely coincident with that of all who are really well-informed and who speak with easily recognized authority in these matters ; and he realizes also, with a heavy heart, that the young people coming and going at his university have but this one chance to secure wise and efficient and inspiring instruction : yet he must wait, and wait, and wait, simply because the educational world is not yet willing to place its affairs upon a business basis, and accept methods of organization and administration which commend themselves to all sane business men in all undertakings. He is attempting to run the university precisely as he would run a woolen factory wailed a member of a faculty, somewhat recently, to one of the trustees ; and it was actually scored against the new president in the board that his methods were too commercial! There ought to be one spot left in the world where there would be something of the dignity of repose 1 exclaimed another very learned professor and altogether idle and indifferent teacher, in an institution whose president was working eighteen hours a day in his effort to force the college up to a higher plane; and at the next meeting of the board there was a semi-official intimation that the president ought to be able to get on better and with less friction with his faculty. Said an honored alumnus of one of our most l\u27enowned institutions, The students\u27 notebooks in physics for the year 1890 bring just as high a price as those for 1898 ! Yet the president of that institution found it impossible to dislodge this calcined and fossiliferous instructor even from his position on the committee on Course of Study, much less from the university ; and what hope \u27 for advancement could possibly exist under such a counselor! A distinguished member of the United States Senate once declared, I love my Alma Mater for all that she has enabled me to be and to do in spite of her ! — a seeming paradox that will be readily understood by every thoughtful graduate who has at last found his true place in the world\u27s economy. The spirit of this age accepts the desirability and the necessity of sound and sane training of a very high order, if we are to be saved from the friction and irritation and irretrievable loss that always follow in the train of ignorance and its consequent weakness. Public and private treasure is poured out most freely to secure this more satisfactory preparation for a larger life. But the wear and tear and waste and delay must continue almost unbearable, unless the business of education is regarded in a business light, is cared for by business methods, and is made subject to that simple but all-efficient law of a proper division of labor and of intelligent and efficient organization, — a division of labor which brings the men who are students of the classics, of the sciences, of the literatures, of philosophy, of history, under the wise direction and immediate control of the man who is necessarily and most desirably a student of humanity; with a responsibility which is coincident with the work in hand, and with an authority entirely commensurate with this responsibility. Whatever of executive difficulties and perplexities will then remain, they will not be the peculiar difficulties and perplexities of to-day. One of the Guild. THE FORESTS OF THE YOSEMITE PARK. The coniferous forests of the Yosemite Park, and of the Sierra in general, surpass all others of their kind in America, or indeed in the world, not only in the size and beauty of the trees, but in the number of species assembled together, and the grandeur of the mountains they are growing on. Leaving the workaday lowlands, and wandering into the heart of the mountains, we find a new world, and stand beside the majestic pines and firs and sequoias silent and awestricken, as if in the presence of superior beings new arrived from some other star, so calm and bright and godlike they are. Going to the woods is going home; for I suppose we came from the woods originally. But in some of nature\u27s forests the adventurous traveler seems a feeble, unwelcome creature; wild beasts and the weather trying to kill him, the rank tangled vegetation armed with spears and stinging needles barring his way and making life a hard struggle. Here everything is hospitable and kind, as if planned for your pleasure, ministering to every want of body and soul. Even the storms are friendly and seem to regard you as a brother, their beauty and tremendous fateful earnestness charming alike. But the weather is mostly sunshine, both winter and summer, and the clear sunny brightness of the park is one of its most striking characteristics. Even the heaviest portions of the main forest belt, where the trees are tallest and stand closest, are not in the least gloomy. The sunshine falls in glory through the colossal spires and crowns, each a symbol of health and strength, the noble shafts faithfully upright like the pillars of temples, upholding a roof of infinite leafy interlacing arches and fretted skylights. The more open 494 The Forests of the Yosemite Park. portions are like spacious parks, carpeted with small shrubs, or only with the fallen needles sprinkled here and there with flowers. In some places, where the ground is level or slopes gently, the trees are assembled in groves, and the flowers and underbrush in trim beds and thickets as in landscape gardens or the lovingly planted grounds of homes ; or they are drawn up in orderly rows around meadows and lakes and along the brows of canons. But in general thef orests are distributed in wide belts, in accordance with climate and the comparative strength of eacli kind in gaining and holding possession of the ground, while anything like monotonous uniformity is prevented by the grandly varied topography, and by the arrangement of the best soil beds in intricate patterns like embroidery; for they are the moraines of ancient glaciers more or less modified by weathering and stream action. These moraines the trees trace over the hills and plateaus and wide furrowed ridges, and far up the sides of the mountains, rising with even growth on levels, and towering above one another on the long rich slopes prepared for them by the vanished glaciers. Had the Sierra forests been cheaply accessible, the most valuable of them commercially would ere this have fallen a prey to the lumberman. Thus far the redwood of the Coast Mountains and the Douglas spruce of Oregon and Washing-, ton have been more available for lumber than the pine of the Sierra. It cost less to go a thousand miles up the coast for timber, where the trees came down to the shores of navigable rivers and bays, than fifty miles up the mountains. Nevertheless, the superior value of the sugar pine for many purposes has tempted capitalists to expend large sums on flumes and railroads to reach the best forests, though perhaps none of these enterprises has paid. Fortunately, the lately established system of parks and reservations has put a stop to any great extension of the business hereabouts, in its most destructive forms. And as the Yosemite Park region has escaped the millmen, and the all-devouring hordes of hoofed locusts have been banished, it is still in\u27the main a pure wilderness, unbroken by axe clearings except on the lower margin, where a few settlers have opened spots beside hay meadows for their cabins and gardens. But these are mere dots of cultivation, in no appreciable degree disturbing the grand solitude. Twenty or thirty years ago a good many trees were felled for their seeds; traces of this destructive method of seed-collecting are still visible along the trails ; but these as well as the shingle-makers\u27 ruins are being rapidly overgrown, the gardens and beds of underbrush once devastated by sheep are blooming again in all their wild glory, and the park is a paradise that makes even the loss of Eden seem insignificant. On the way to Yosemite Valley, you get some grand views over the forests of the Merced and Tuolumne basins and glimpses of some of the finest trees by the roadside without leaving your seat in the stage. But to learn how they live and behave in pure wildness, to see them in their varying aspects through the seasons and weather, rejoicing in the great storms, in the spiritual mountain light, putting forth their new leaves and flowers when all the streams are in flood and the birds are singing, and sending away their seeds in the thoughtful Indian summer when all the landscape is glowing in deep calm enthusiasm, like the face of a god, —for this-you must love them and live with them, as free from schemes and cares and time as the trees themselves. And surely nobody will find anything hard in this. Even the blind must enjoy these woods, drinking their fragrance, listening to the music of the winds in their groves, fingering their flowers and plumes and cones and richly furrowed boles. The kind of study required is as easy and natural as breathing. Without any great knowledge of botany or wood- I i The Forests of the Yosemite Park. 495 «t» craft, in a single season you may learn the name and something more of nearly every kind of tree in the park. With few exceptions all the Sierra trees are growing in the park, — nine species of pine, two of silver fir, and one each of Douglas spruce, libocedrus, hemlock, juniper, and sequoia, — sixteen conifers in all, and about the same number of round-headed trees, oaks, maples, poplars, laurel, alder, dogwood, tumion, etc. The first of the conifers you meet in going up the range from the west is the digger nut pine (Pintis sabinicma), a remarkably open airy wide-branched tree forty to sixty feet high, with long sparse grayish green foliage and large cones. At a height of fifteen to thirty feet from the ground the trunk divides into several main branches, which, after bearing away from one another, shoot straight up and form separate heads as if the axis of the tree had been broken, while the secondary branches divide again and again into rather slender sprays loosely tasseled with leaves eight to twelve inches long. The yellow and purple flowers are about an inch long, the staminate in showy clusters. The big rough burly cones, five to eight or ten inches in length and five or six in diameter, are rich brown in color when ripe, and full of hard-shelled nuts that are greatly prized by Indians and squirrels. This strange-looking pine, enjoying hot sunshine like a palm, is sparsely distributed along the driest part of the Sierra among small oaks and chaparral, and with its gray mist of foliage, strong trunk and branches, and big cones, seen in relief on the glowing sky, forms the most striking feature of the foothill vegetation. Finns attenuata is a small slender arrowy tree, with pale green leaves in threes, clustered flowers half an inch long, brownish yellow and crimson, and cones whorled in conspicuous clusters around the branches and also around the trunk. The cones never fall off or open until the tree dies. They are about four inches long, exceedingly strong and solid, and varnished with hard resin forming a waterproof and almost worm and squirrel proof package, in which the seeds are kept fresh and safe during the lifetime of the tree. Sometimes one of the trunk cones is overgrown and imbedded in the heart wood like a knot, but nearly all are pushed out and kept on the surface by the pressure of the successive layers of wood against the base. This admirable little tree grows on brushy sunbeaten slopes, which from their position and the inflammable character of the vegetation are most frequently fire-swept. These grounds it is able to hold against all comers, however big and strong, by saving its seeds until death, when all it has produced are scattered over the bare cleared ground, and a new generation quickly springs out of the ashes. Thus the curious fact that all the trees of extensive groves and belts are of the same age is accounted for, and their slender habit; for the lavish abundance of seed sown at the same time makes a crowded growth, and the seedlings with an even start rush up in a hurried race for light and life. Only a few of the attenuata and sa- biniana are within the boundaries of the park; the former on the side of the Merced Canon, the latter on the walls of Hetch-Hetchy Valley and in the canon below it. The nut pine (Pinus monophyllct) is a small, hardy, contented-looking tree, about fifteen or twenty feet high and a foot in diameter. In its youth the close radiating and aspiring branches form a handsome broad - based pyramid, but when fully grown it becomes round- topped, knotty, and irregular, throwing out crooked divergent limbs like an apple tree. The leaves are pale grayish green, about an inch and a half long, and instead of being divided into clusters they are single, round, sharp-point\u27 ed, and rigid like spikes, amid which in the spring the red flowers glow brightly. 496 The Forests of the Yosemite Park. The cones are only about two inches in length and breadth, but nearly half of their bulk is made up of sweet nuts. This fruitful little pine grows on the dry east side of the park, along the margin of the Mono sage plain, and is the commonest tree of the short mountain ranges of the Great Basin. Tens of thousands of acres are covered with it, forming bountiful orchards for the red man. Being so low and accessible the cones are easily beaten off with poles, and the nuts procured by roasting until the scales open. To the tribes of the desert and sage plains these seeds are the staff of life. They are eaten either raw or parched, or in the form of mush or cakes after being pounded into meal. The time of nut harvest in the autumn is the Indian\u27s merriest time of all the year. An industrious squirrelish family can gather fifty or sixty bushels in a single month before the snow comes, and then their bread for the winter is sure. The white pine (Pinus flexilis) is widely distributed through the Rocky Mountains and the ranges of the Great Basin, where in many places it grows to a good size, and is an important timber tree where none better is to be found. In the park it is sparsely scattered along the eastern flank of the range from Mono Pass southward, above the nut pine, at an elevation of from eight to ten thousand feet, dwarfing to a tangled bush near the timber-line, but under favorable conditions attaining a height of forty or fifty feet, with a diameter of three to five. The long branches show a tendency to sweep out in bold curves, like those of the mountain and sugar pines, to which it is closely related. The needles are in clusters of five, closely packed on the ends of the branchlets. The cones are about five inches long, —• the smaller ones nearly oval, the larger cylindrical. But the most interesting feature of the tree is its bloom, the vivid red pistillate flowers glowing among the leaves like coals of fire. The dwarf pine or white-barked pine {Pinus albicaulis) is sure to interest every observer on account of its curious low matted habit, and the great height on the snowy mountains at which, it bravely grows. It forms the extreme edge of the timber-line on both flanks of the summit mountains — if so lowly a tree can be called timber — at an elevation of ten to twelve thousand feet above the sea. Where it is first met on the lower limit of its range it may be twenty or thirty feet high, but farther up the rocky windswept slopes, where the snow lies deep, and heavy for six months of the year, it makes shaggy clumps and beds, crinkled and pressed flat, over which you can easily walk. Nevertheless in this crushed, down-pressed, felted condition it clings hardily to life, puts forth fresh leaves every spring on the ends of its tasseled branchlets, blooms bravely in the lashing blasts with abundance of gay red and purple flowers, matures its seeds in the short summers, and often outlives the favored giants of the sunlands far below. One of the trees that I examined was only about three feet high, with a stem six inches in diameter at the ground, and branches that spread out horizontally as if they had grown up against a ceiling ; yet it was four hundred and twenty-six years old, and one of its supple branchlets, about an eighth of an inch in diameter inside the bark, was seventy-five years old, and so tough that I tied it into knots. At the age of this dwarf many of the sugar and yellow pines and sequoias are seven feet in diameter and over two hundred feet high. In detached clumps never touched by fire the fallen needles of centuries of growth make fine elastic mattresses for the weary mountaineer, while the tasseled branchlets spread a roof over him, and the dead roots, half resin, usually found in abundance, make capital camp fires, unquenchable in the thickest storms of rain or snow. Seen from a distance the belts and patches darkening the The Forests of the Yosemite Park. 497 mountain sides look like mosses on a roof, and bring to mind Dr. Johnson\u27s remarks on the trees of Scotland. His guide, anxious for the honor of Mull, was still talking of its woods and pointing them out. Sir said Johnson, I saw at Tobermory what they called a wood, which I unluckily took for heath. If you show me what I shall take for furze, it will be something. The mountain pine (Pinus monti- cola) is far the largest of the Sierra tree mountaineers. Climbing nearly as high as the dwarf albicaulis, it is still a giant in size, bold and strong, standing erect on the storm - beaten peaks and ridges, tossing its cone-laden branches in the rough winds, living a thousand years, and reaching its greatest size — ninety to a hundred feet in height, six to eight in diameter—-just where other trees, its companions, are dwarfed. But it is not able to endure burial in snow so long as the albicaulis and flexilis. Therefore, on the upper limit of its range it is found on slopes which, from their steepness or exposure, are least snowy. Its soft graceful beauty in youth, and its leaves, cones, and out- sweeping feathery branches, constantly remind you of the sugar pine, to which it is closely allied. An admirable tree, growing nobler in form and size the colder and balder the mountains about it. The giants of the main forest in the favored middle region are the sequoia, sugar pine, yellow pine, libocedrus, Douglas spruce, and the two silver firs. The park sequoias are restricted to two small groves, a few miles apart, on the Tuolumne and Merced divide, about seventeen miles from Yosemite Valley. The Big Oak Flat road to the valley runs through the Tuolumne Grove, the Coulterville through the Merced. The more famous and better known Mariposa Grove, belonging to the state, lies near the southwest corner of the park, a few miles above Wawona. The sugar pine (Pinus Lambertiana) vol. lxxxv. — no. 510. 32 is first met in the park in open, sunny, flowery woods, at an elevation of about thirty-five hundred feet above the sea, attains full development at a height between five and six thousand feet, and vanishes at the level of eight thousand feet. In many places, especially on the northern slopes of the main ridges between the rivers, it forms the bulk of the forest, but mostly it is intimately associated with its noble companions, above which it towers in glorious majesty on every hill, ridge, and plateau from one extremity of the range to the other, a distance of five hundred miles, —