CONIFERJE. 



SILVA OF NORTE AMERICA. 



35 



forests which clothe their high slopes.^ It is also widely distributed over the mountains of West 

 Virginia, forming on the head-waters of the Elk and Gauley Rivers a broad belt through which it is 

 scattered often abundantly, sometimes occupying almost exclusively the high slopes, particularly those 

 which face the north, and the summits of the mountains ; farther south it is small and less abundant, 

 and at the southern limits of its range it is usually only forty or fifty feet in height and confined 

 to the high mountains, where, occasionally forming pure forests, it usually grows in small groves near 

 their summits with the Balsam Fir and the Yellow Birch, and rarely below elevations of five thousand 

 feet above the sea-level. 



Picea rtibens, which is the principal timber Spruce of the northeastern United States, and, with the 

 exception of the White Pine, the most valuable coniferous timber-tree of the region that it inhabits, 

 produces light soft close-grained wood which is not strong, nor durable when exposed to the weather ; 

 it is pale slightly tinged with red, with paler sapwood about two inches thick, and a satiny surface, 

 and contains remote conspicuous medullary rays, few resin passages, and thin resinous bands of small 

 summer cells. The specific gravity of the absolutely dry wood is 0.4516, a cubic foot weighing 28.13 

 pounds. Now that the most valuable white pine has been exhausted in the forests of the northeastern 

 states, the Red Spruce is their most important timber-tree, and immense quantities of its lumber are 

 manufactured every year from trees cut in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and northern New York, 

 which supply the largest part of the Red Spruce logs, although red spruce is also manufactured in 

 Pennsylvania and West Virginia. It is used largely for the flooring of houses and for joists, scantlings, 

 and other square timbers employed in construction ; it is considered the most valuable wood produced in 

 the United States for the sounding-boards of musical instruments, and it is one of the principal woods 

 used in this country in the production of paper pulp. Like those obtained from the Black Spruce, the 

 resinous exudations of the Red Spruce are used for chewing-gum, and from its branches Spruce beer 

 is made. 



The first real description of the Red Spruce, with an excellent figure, was published by Lambert ; 

 it had been prepared from a tree cultivated in England which was supposed to have been brought from 

 Newfoundland. It was the Red Spruce, no doubt, brought down to the coast from the forests of 

 Maine, which attracted the attention of Josselyn by its great size and its value for shipbuilding.^ 



Confounded for manv vears with Ficea Mariana.^ little attention has bfipn nairl tn th^ T?,pd SnmPA 



^ In the Mehoopany Creek basin in Wyoming County in the 

 northeastern part of Pennsylvania the Red Spruce is abundant 

 between elevations of one thousand five hundred and two thousand 

 two hundred feet above the sea, growing with the Sugar Maple, the 

 Beech, the Yellow Birch, and the Hemlock. Before its destruction 

 to feed pulp-mills it grew in large quantities and in great perfection 

 in Bear Meadows, Centre County, and it appears to be generally 

 scattered at high elevations along the whole of the Alleghany 

 range in Pennsylvania. 



2 " Spruce is a goodly Tree, of which they make Masts for Ships, 

 and Sail Yards : It is generally conceived by those that have skill 

 in Building of Ships, that here is absolutely the best Trees in the 

 World, many of them being three Fathom about, and of great 

 length." (Josselyn, New England's Rarities, 63.) 



" At Pascataway there is now a Spruce-tree, brought down to the 

 water-side by our Mass-men, of an incredible bigness, and so long that 

 no Skipper durst ever yet adventure to ship it, but there it lyes and 

 Rots." (Josselyn, An Account of 7 wo Voyages to New England, 67.) 



2 Lambert, who first distinguished the Red Spruce intelligently, 

 clearly understood the characters of the Spruces of eastern North 

 America, and the figures in his Description of the Genus Pinus 

 admirably show the distinctive characters of the three species, and 

 have never been surpassed. Until recent years, however, the bota- 



nists who have written of these trees since Lambert have copied 

 his descriptions, or have united the Red and the Black Spruces, or 

 have considered the former a variety of the latter. The confusion 

 with regard to these two trees dates from the time of the Michauxs. 

 The elder saw in the northern states only Black and White 

 Spruces, and the son makes his description of the Black Spruce 

 include the Red Spruce, which he considered merely a form due to 

 soil conditions, his figure of the Black Spruce being taken from 

 a branch of the Red Spruce. Nuttall, in his Genera of North Amer- 

 ican Plants^ and Pursh, in his Flora Americce Septentrionalis, retained 

 Lambert's names, but evidently had little information about these 

 trees, and Gray, in the early editions of the Manual of Botany of 

 the Northern States, ignored the Red Spruce entirely, and in the 

 fourth edition spoke of it as a northern form of the Black Spruce. 

 The Red Spruce does not appear ever to have been common or 

 to have flourished very often in European plantations, and the 

 European writers on conifers, down to the time of Beissner, who 

 have described this tree at all, have been obliged for want of mate- 

 rial to follow Lambert or Michaux. Mr. William Gorrie, however 

 (Trans. Bot. Sac. Edinburgh, x. 353), has well described the Red 

 Spruce from trees which had been planted about 1855 near Tyne- 

 head in Midlothian, Scotland, and which, fifteen years later, were 

 from twelve to eighteen feet high and had produced cones. 



