Nor are all our woods of this general type made up of the same species, for everyone knows about the endless spruce and fir forests of the north, exclusively evergreen, and in the summer nearly always moist. This spruce belt stretches practically across the continent, where, in the West, other and our most gigantic evergreens, replace the eastern spruce and fir. A little farther south is the region of the white pine now nearly unknown as a virgin forest type, as its great value led to early and ruthless cutting. The white pine region is generally the area from New England southward along the Alleghenies and westward to Illinois. But the most characteristic of the temperate forest types is our summer forest, so called from its general lack of evergreens and its beautiful green foliage of summer and its bare branches in winter. Beech and birch and maple, in different proportions according to local conditions, predominate in such woods. These hard-wooded trees, with many others that are scattered through them, have been among the most valuable of all the natural plant products of our country and their destruction has been upon such a scale that only in a few places may the virgin forest be seen at the present time. Where it does occur we find the forest floor often with nothing growing on it except a mass of spring flowers which are half matured before the leaves of the forest canopy close out nearly all the light and much water and put them to rest until another year. The great preponderance of spring-flowering herbs in Eastern North America is due to their early warming up before the foliage of the trees cuts off their light. And in some virgin forests of this sort, particularly where there is a large mixture of oak, the writer has seen hundreds of square rods without undergrowth or herbaceous vegetation of any kind. Such places, very rare indeed at the present time due to senseless and wicked cutting, are rather dark, perfectly open to view for hundreds of feet ahead, and dotted only with the huge trunks of the trees that characterize this climax type of the temperate or summer forest. The absence of direct sunlight and interception of much rain under the forest canopy has other effects besides stopping the growth of herbs and shrubs which are common enough along the edges, or where openings are made by the fall of old trees. It prevents the germination and growth of nearly all the seeds falling from such trees, and in a really virgin forest of this sort, almost no seedlings will be found. Upon cleared or open land thousands of saplings will cover much of the ground, but nearly all these will die off due to crowding, and leave as the climax only enough trees to close over the forest canopy.