12 8ILVA OF NORTH AMEBIC A. C0Nn?EEiE. 



r 



and at maturity are raised on stout stalks about an eighth of an inch long. The pistillate flowers are 

 ohlonff, almost sessile, with nearly orbicular scales, and with bracts which are produced into elongated 

 tips. The cones are oblong, short-stalked, and from an inch to an inch and a half in length, with 

 numerous thin stiff scales which are nearly entire or slightly erose and sometimes a little reflexed on 

 the margins ; they are more or less thickly coated on the lower surface below the middle with hoary 

 tomentum, and after the seeds are scattered stand out at right angles to the axis of the cone or often 

 become reflexed. The seeds are nearly a quarter of an inch long, with a pale brown coat, and are from 

 one half to two thirds the length of the thin and fragile pale wings, which are broadest near the middle 

 and obhquely rounded at the apex. 



Scattered on the moist deep soil of bottom-lands through forests of Hemlocks, Firs, and Cotton- 

 woods, and mixed with the Yeflow Pine^ the Lodge Pole Pine, and the Douglas Spruce on high 

 benches and dry mountain sides, the western Larch grows at elevations of between two thousand and 

 seven thousand feet above the sea-level, usually singly or in small groves. Its home is in the basin of 

 the upper Columbia River, from which it crosses in southern British Columbia to the mountains over- 

 looking the eastern shores of Shuswap Lake, one of the sources of the south fork of the Thompson^ 

 where it finds the northern limits of its range in latitude 51° north, and is not abundant ; * in the 

 United States it grows near most of the mountain streams which feed the Columbia, from the western 

 slopes of the continental divide in northern Montana to the eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains, 

 extending southward to the Blue and Powder Eiver Mountains and the eastern foothills of Mt. 

 Jefferson in Oregon. Of comparatively smaU size and less generally multiplied northward and south- 

 ward and on the Cascade Mountains, the western Larch is most abundant and attains its largest size 

 on the bottom-lands of the streams which flow into Flat Head Lake in northern Montana, and in 

 northern Idaho, where it is the characteristic and most interesting inhabitant of the great forests that 



cover this interior region. 



The noblest of the Larch-trees, surpassing all others in thickness and height of stem, splendid in 

 massiveness and in the colors of the great plates into which its bark is divided, Larix occidentalis is 

 one of the most valuable timber-trees of the continent, and no other North American coniferous tree 

 produces such hard and heavy wood, well suited for use in furniture of the best quality. The wood is 

 very heavy, exceedingly hard and strong, close-grained, susceptible of receiving a good polish, and very 

 durable in contact with the soil ; it is bright Hght red, with thin nearly white sapwood, and contains 

 broad dark-colored resinous bands of small summer cells, few obscure resin passages, and numerous thin 

 medullary rays ; the specific gravity of the absolutely dry wood is 0.7407, a cubic foot weighing 46.16 

 pounds. It is largely used for railway-ties and fence-posts, and is manufactured into lumber used in 

 cabinet-making and the interior finish of buildings. An exudation, which flows abundantly from 

 wounds in the trunk and forms large sheets, has a sweetish taste, and is gathered and eaten by Indians 

 in southern British Columbia.^ 



The earliest notice of Larix occidentalis is in the journal of Lewis and Clark, who, in their entry 

 of June 15, 1806, record the occurrence of a Larch-tree in the forests on the upper Clearwater River, 

 which they ascended in crossing the Bitter Root Mountains on their homeward journey.^ In 1827 it 



r 



was seen near Fort Colville on the upper Columbia by David Douglas, who mistook it for the Larch 

 of Europe,* but to Thomas Nuttall, who found it on the Blue Mountains in 1834, belongs the credit of 



1 G. M. Dawson, Can. Nat. n. ser. ix. 329. — Macoun, Cat. Can. ^ History of the Expedition under Command of Lewis and Clark, 



r 



P^- 475. ed. Coaes, iii. 1043, 1066. — Sargent, Garden and Forest, x. 39. 



2 This substance, which is of a brownish yellow color, somewhat ^ Douglas, Companion Bot. Mag. ii. 109. 



porous, and possesses a moderately sweet taste with a terebin- Of this tree Douglas, in his journal, says : " I measured some 



thine flavor, is found by Trimble to be free from resin and not thirty feet in circumference ; and several which have been leveled 



identical with melezitose, as might have been expected, its physical to the ground by the late storms were one hundred and forty-five 



properties closely resembUng dextrin. (See Am. Jour. Pharm. Ixx. feet long, with wood perfectly clean and strong." If Douglas had 



152.) 



realized that he was in the presence of one of the great trees of 



