Watching seedling pines grow year by year it is difficult to see how the great, clean trunked, old-time pines that towered over two hundred feet tall and were from four to six feet in diameter came about. The free growing pasture pine makes a round headed shrub, for the first ten years or so of its life, with abundant long limbs, and is clad in profuse foliage from top to bottom. Even as decades pass its limbs still remain numerous and though there is abundant wood in the half century old pasture pine it is of little use for lumber, for the limbs, young and old, have filled its trunk with knots. Where our present day trees have seeded in thickly and uniformly over considerable space it is different. Then as the trees grow old they grow taller, each struggling to outdo its neighbors and get more light and air. Lower limbs decay in time and in the progress of forty or fifty years we get a "second growth" pine which is fairly limbless for a height of forty or fifty feet. Give the trees another half century if you will. I know many groves that have had that and still their trunks, though fairly bare, show the knots where the limbs have been and produce anything but clear lumber. It may be that by giving these century-old groves another century or two we should have something like the old perfect boles that our great grandfathers got out of the Maine woods, but I am not sure about it. I see no promise of it in the conditions under which pines grow today. Even my patriarch, though he has, I am very sure, sufficient years to his credit would cut up into only a medium quality of box boards; there is no clear lumber in him. To produce the wonder trees of the early half of the nineteenth century the tiny seeds must have rooted plentifully in rich soil, the trees must have grown so close together as to steadily and persistently crowd out the weaker and shorter, and in the passing of two, three or four centuries we had remaining the magnificent specimens, towering two hundred or more feet in the air, their trunks without limb or knot for more than half that distance. Such conditions may account for these enormous trees, yet I am inclined to think that they do not. I am inclined to the belief that in these giant pines we had a variety of Pinus strobus which was very closely allied to our smaller trees, but which was not the same, just as the Sequoia gigantea of the higher Sierras is a gigantic variety of redwood, closely allied to but not the same as the Sequoia sempervirens, which flourishes nearer the coast and in the lower levels. That would easily explain why our pines, which we call "second growth," show little tendency to become such majestic or so long lived trees as the giants of a century and more in age. It is doubtful if any of the old time mighty ones remain in any remotest corner of our forests. It is a pity, too, for it is probable that in destroying the last one we destroyed a variety of pine that was far nobler than any left.