SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 



\ 



LARIX 



Flowers solitary, naked, monoecious, the staminate axillary ; stamens indefinite, 

 anther-cells 2, surmounted by their connective ; the pistillate terminal, ovules 2 under 

 each scale. Fruit a woody strobile, maturing intone season. Branchlets dimorphic. 

 Leaves scattered or fascicled, deciduous. 



Larix, Adanson, i^a?/^. PZ. ii. 480 (1763). — Jjink, Abhand. Pinus, Linnseus, Gen. 293 (in part) (1737). — Endllcher, 

 Akad, Berl. 1827, 183. — Engelmann, Trans. St. Louis Gen. 260 (in part). — Meisner, Gen* 352 (in part). 



Acad, ii, 211. — Bentham & Hooker, Gen. iii. 442. — Baillon, Hist. PI. xii. 44 (in part). 



Eichler, Engler & Frantl Pflanzenfam. ii. pt, i. 75. — Abies, A. L. de Jussieu, Gen. 414 (in part) (1789). 

 Masters, Jour, Linn. Sac, xxx. 31. 



Tall pyramidal trees, with thick sometimes furrowed scaly bark, hard heavy heartwood conspicu- 

 ously marked by dark bands of summer cells impregnated with resin, thin pale sapwood, slender remote 

 horizontal and often pendulous branches, elongated leading branchlets roughened by persistent leaf- 

 scars, usually short thick spur-hke lateral branchlets disappearing at the end of a few years or 

 occasionally developing into vigorous branches. Buds small, subglobose, covered by numerous broadly 

 ovate thin chestnut-brown lustrous scales, those of the lower pair lateral and opposite, the others spirally 

 disposed ; outer scales accrescent, marking the lateral branchlets with prominent ring-like scars, the 

 inner deciduous with the appearance of the leaves and the falling of the staminate flowers.^ Leaves 

 linear-subulate, triangular and rounded above or rarely tetragonal, keeled and stomatiferous below, 

 articulate on low persistent ultimately woody bases, containing single fibro-vascular bundles, and two resin 

 canals in their lateral angles close to the epidermis, slightly incurved in the bud, deciduous ; spirally 

 disposed and remote on leading shoots, on short lateral branchlets in crowded fascicles, each leaf in the 

 axil of a minute deciduous bud-scale. Flowers monoecious, solitary, terminal, the staminate on leafless, the 

 pistillate on leaf-bearing lateral branchlets of the previous or of an earlier year, surrounded at the base 

 by the reflexed inner bud-scales. Staminate flowers globose, ovoid or oblong, sessile or pedunculate 

 composed of numerous spirally arranged short-stalked two-celled subglobose anthers opening longitu- 

 dinally, their connectives produced above them into short points or gland-like umbos; pollen-grains 

 lobose. Pistillate flowers appearing with the leaves, subglobose, subsessile, composed of few or 

 numerous spirally arranged suborbicular stipitate scales bearing on their inner face near the base two 

 naked collateral inverted ovules, each scale in the axis of a much longer mucronate membranaceous 

 usually scarlet bract, the lowest bracts without scales and roughening with their persistent tumid closely 

 imbricated bases the stalks of the cones. Fruit an ovoid oblong conical or subglobose short-stalked 

 cone, at first nearly horizontal, finally assurgent by the incurving of the stout stalk, composed of the 

 slightly thickened woody suborbicular or oblong-obovate closely or loosely imbricated concave scales of 



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