judges to be as valuable as that of Oregon and Washington, compared with which our forests in Maine are hardly more than tall undergrowth. A very large percentage of the Alaska timber grows at the most convenient points for shipment, making it especially available. The white spruce, called the Sitka pine, rises to a height of from a hundred and fifty to a hundred and eighty feet, and measures from three to six feet in diameter. When this growth is cut into dimension lumber it very much resembles our southern pitch-pine. There is also found in these forests the usual variety of cedar, fir, ash, maple, and birch trees, mingled with the others of loftier growth. The yellow cedar of this region grows nowhere else of such size and quality. It is much prized, and best adapted for shipbuilding, having been found to be unequaled for durability, and also because it is impervious to the troublesome teredo, or boring worm, which destroys the ordinary piles under the wharves at Puget Sound, as well as at Sitka, so rapidly as to render it necessary to renew them every three or four years. Southern latitudes, in the neighborhood of the Gulf of Mexico, suffer equally from the depredations of this active marine pest. The Alaska cedar is also a choice cabinet wood, possessing a very agreeable odor, considerable quantities of it being shipped for select use in San Francisco and elsewhere. The coast of the Alexander Archipelago comprises nearly eight thousand miles of shore line, forming long straight avenues of calm deep water many miles in length, sprinkled with islands densely wooded from the water’s edge, while the number of good harbors is almost countless, in which vessels may lay alongside the land and receive their cargoes of timber or lumber in the most convenient manner. When the woods of Maine and Michigan cease to yield satisfactorily, as they must do by and by, we have here a ready source of supply which no ordinary demand can exhaust in many years. One enthusiastic writer upon this subject predicts that this part of the North Pacific coast will eventually become the ship-yard of the American continent. One is hardly prepared to indorse so sweeping a prediction, but that there is a nearly inexhaustible supply of the necessary timber for such a purpose even an inexperienced visitor cannot fail to realize. It is gratifying to know that these forests are free from all danger by fire, which often proves so destructive in the State of Washington and elsewhere. This immunity from a much dreaded exigency is owing to the frequent rains, which keep the undergrowth in Alaska so moist that the flames cannot spread.