The medullary rays of redwood are thin and very obscure, but numerous. Few woods show them to less advantage in quarter-sawing. The lack of luster in the surface of polished panels is well known. The wood’s beauty is in its sameness and richness of color. Except curly specimens and burls, the wood may be said to have no figure, though in planks cut tangentially, the contrast of spring and summerwood displays some figure in a modest way. It is possible to wash much of the coloring matter out of the wood, if it is first chipped fine. It washes from the surface by ordinary exposure to weather. Red rainwater runs from a roof of new redwood shingles, and weatherboarding, posts, and picket fences fade perceptibly in a few months. This coloring matter when washed out in large amounts in the process of paper making has been manufactured into fuel gas. A complete list of the uses of redwood is not practicable, for this material goes into most of the large wood-using factories of this country, and much is exported--nearly 60,000,000 feet annually going to foreign countries. It has been much employed in California cities and towns for picket fences, and as posts for wire and plank fences. It is, next to western red cedar, the most important shingle wood of the Pacific coast. One western railroad alone had in its tracks 12,000,000 redwood ties at one time. Builders of tanks, flumes, and water pipes procure some of their best material, and large quantities of it, from redwood sawmills. Few woods are more universally found in furniture factories. GOWEN CYPRESS (_Cupressus goveniana_) follows the California coast from Mendocino county, California, to San Diego, and ascends mountains to the height of 3,000 feet in some localities. At its best it is fifty feet high and two feet in diameter; but it extends as a shrub over many sandy tracts. Specimens no more than a foot high sometimes bear cones. The Gowen cypress sheds its leaves the third and fourth years. Cones are from one-half to one inch long, and each bears about 100 seeds. The wood is light, soft, weak, light brown in color, the thick sapwood nearly white. The medullary rays are numerous but obscure. The wood is used for posts and other ranch purposes. Woodpeckers attack the trunks, picking holes through the bark to suck the juice from the cambium layer beneath.