CEDAR. 329 
J. Virginiana is the largest, the widest spread, and the most 
useful of the American Junipers. It is the only conifer (and one 
of the very few trees) which is found East as well as West, and 
certainly the only one which at the same time extends through so 
many degrees of latitude. It is well known from the St. Lawrence 
to the Cedar Keys of Florida, and from the Atlantic to the Rocky 
Mountains and even to the Pacific Coast of British Columbia; on 
the Upper Missouri (Cedar Island) it attains large dimensions. 
It is commonly of a pyramidal form with shreddy bark and red 
aromatic heart-wood; soft and easily splitting, but extremely 
durable, in fact almost imperishable. The branchlets are slender 
and 4-angled. The leaves of the young plants and of vigorous 
shoots are acicular, subulate and spreading; but on the older 
trees they are nearly all very minute, scale-like, and closely 
imbricate. From the great disparity in the proportion of scale- 
like leaves and subulate leaves in different individuals, as well as 
the more or less distinct habit, it is difficult to find two trees 
exactly alike, even in a large plantation. The prevailing hue is 
dark sombre green; but in the variety glauca (syn. alba argentea) 
the foliage is of a silvery glaucous tinge, and this variety has a 
more compact conical habit. 
The J. V. humilis is a dwarf spreading form of reddish tinge, 
and the J. V. pendula, of which there are two or three varieties, 
has long, slender, pendulous branches. There are also variegated 
varieties, aura and alba, in the ordinary form. 
The yield of essential oil from Juniperus Virginiana has been 
estimated at as much as 34 per cent. It distils over as a soft 
semi-fluid mass, consisting of a liquid hydrocarbon Cedrene, 
C,;H.,, and an oxygenated solid camphor or stereoptene, C,;H.,O. 
To separate the camphor, the crude oil is distilled, the distillate is 
pressed between linen to free it from the greater portion of the 
liquid cedrene which adheres to it, and then crystallized from 
alcohol of ordinary strength, which retains the rest of the cedrene 
in solution. Cedar camphor thus purified is a silky crystalline 
mass of great beauty and lustre and of aromatic odour. It melts 
at 74° C. and boils at 282° C. without alteration. It is very 
sparingly soluble in water, but freely so in alcohol, from whence 
it crystallizes in needles of a silky lustre. It gives by analysis 
81 per cent. of carbon and 11°8 of hydrogen, agreeing with the 
preceding formula; hence it is isomeric with the camphor of 
