SCOTCH PINE 117 



thousand feet above the sea of the tree on the great 

 mountaui headlands 



The Scotch pine is indigenous to Scotland, and is more 

 or less naturalised throughout England, appearing thoroughly 

 at home, for instance, on the great moorland tracts of 

 Hampshire and Dorsetshire, though it does not attain 

 there to the grand dimensions and noble growth it reaches 

 in its northern home. In Scotland one finds vast natural 

 forests of it, and it is only here in the midst of the grand 

 mountain scenery that one realises to the full its wild 

 and picturesque beauty, as it stands " moored in the rifted 

 rock " and in situations often quite inaccessible to the human 

 foot. To view it rising from a well kept lawn, and 

 surrounded by calceolarias at its feet in a Bournemouth 

 pleasaunce, is barely sufficient to justify one in saying 

 that he has really seen a Scotch pine at all. 



The tree is widely distributed over Northern Europe, 

 in Norway, Sweden, and Lapland, and in Russian Asia, 

 everywhere forming dense forests. It would appear 

 to flourish best on granite or on dry sand. It is 

 commercially a most valuable tree, as besides its immense 

 value for timber for building operations, it yields tar, 

 pitch, and turpentine. Its durability as timber is 

 proved to be scarcely less than that of the oak, and 

 it has a great power of resisting water-action. Divers 

 descending to the wreck of the 'Bjyal George found this 

 wood less destroyed by water and the assaults of various 

 sea-creatures than any other, and the Stadthuis at 

 Amsterdam rises securely from its watery bed, sustained 

 by over thirteen thousand fir-wood piles. As a fuel it 

 kindles rapidly and burns with a great heat, but gives a 



