[5] "With very few exceptions, the Pines are monoecious (having the male and female flowers on the same tree). The yellow pollen, which is very abundant, often falls in such quantities upon the branches and leaves below, and upon the neighboring plants, as to cover them; and being as light and fine as dust, it has been sometimes carried by the wind from a forest of Pines and spread upon the ground at a great distance. This affords a probable explanation of the stories which have been told, and which have been regarded with superstition or incredulity, of showers of sulphur." Lambert, describing the common Scotch Fir, says, "The pollen is sometimes in spring carried away by the wind in such quantities as to alarm the ignorant with the notion of its raining brimstone." The Pitch Pine is inferior to the red in size. The largest measurements I have ever seen give to one a diameter of two and a half feet, and ninety feet height; to another a girth of seven feet at the ground, and eighty feet height. This Pine is chiefly valued for the excellence of its fuel; and for generating steam in working engines it is preferable to any other wood.[6] Formerly, in some parts of the country, it was found much larger than it now is. "Men are living in Massachusetts and Maine who remember that it was not uncommon to find them of more than a hundred feet in height and four or five feet in diameter." [6] The amount of this wood annually consumed on the rail-roads in Massachusetts is valued at $200,000. At present the White Pine is altogether the most important of the species. In New England, particularly in the northern part, it is often found to measure one hundred and fifty feet in height. It is said that not many years since pines were found in the eastern part of New York which measured two hundred and forty feet in height. "Lambert's Pine, on the Northwest Coast, is found growing to the height of two hundred and thirty feet, and Douglas's Pine, in the same region, the loftiest tree known, has been said to exceed three hundred feet." The traveler quoted above describes one of the following dimensions: "One specimen, which had been blown down by the wind--and this was certainly not the largest which I saw--was of the following dimensions: its entire length was two hundred and fifteen feet; its circumference, three feet from the ground, was fifty-seven feet nine inches (nineteen feet three inches in diameter); and at one hundred and thirty-four feet from the ground it was seventeen feet five inches" in circumference, or about six feet in diameter.[7]