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106 SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 



CONIFERS, 



and the pistillate flowers are oblong-oval, with scales rounded above, much broader than they are long 

 and shorter than their oblong pale yellow-green bracts rounded at the broad apes which terminates 

 in a slender elongated tip, and denticulate and strongly reflexed above the middle. The cones are 

 oblong-ovate or nearly oval, rounded at the somewhat narrowed apex, usually about two and a half 

 inches in length and an inch and an eighth in thickness, with scales which are five eighths of an inch 

 broad and twice as wide as they are long, dark purple and puberulous on the exposed portions, and at 



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maturity nearly half covered by their pale yellow-green reflexed bracts. The seeds are an eighth of 

 an inch in length and nearly as long as their dark lustrous wings, which are much expanded and very 

 oblique at the apex. 



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Abies Fraseriy which grows only on the highest of the southern Appalachian mountains, where 

 it is distributed from southeastern Virginia ^ through western North Carolina to Tennessee, often forms 

 forests sometimes of considerable extent at elevations of between four and six thousand feet above the 

 sea-level, giving to the upper slopes of these mountains their dark and sombre appearance^ or mingles 

 with the Red Spruce, the Yellow Birch, and the Hemlock.^ 



The wood of Abies Fraseri is very light, soft, not strong, and coarse-grained ; it is pale brown, 

 with nearly white sapwood, and contains broad inconspicuous bands of small summer cells and numerous 

 thin medullary rays. The specific gravity of the absolutely dry wood is 0.3565, a cubic foot weighing 

 22.22 pounds. It has been occasionally manufactured into lumber for the construction of hotels and 

 other buildings at high elevations on the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee. 



Abies Fraseri^ wsis introduced into European gardens in 1811 by John Fraser,* who first made 

 this tree known to science and whose labors as a botanical collector are kept green by its specific name. 

 Short-lived and hardly distinct enough in habit and general appearance from the Balsam Fir of the 

 north to be interesting to planters, Abies Fraseri has little to recommend it as an ornament of 



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parks, from which, since the early years of its first introduction, it has probably almost completely 

 disappeared, Abies balsamea raised from the seeds of cones with slightly exserted bracts gathered in 

 Pennsylvania and New England being usually cultivated in the United States and England as Abies 

 FraserL It has proved entirely hardy in the Arnold Arboretum, where it produces cones in 

 abundance. 



1 AUes Fraseri was found in May, 1892, on the slopes of Mt. ^ _^ii^g Fraseri is almost universally called the She Balsam by 

 Kogers, in Grayson County, southwestern Virginia, by N. L. and the mountaineers of North Carolina, in distinction to He Balsam, 

 E. G. Britton and Anna Murray Vail. the name given by them to the E-ed Spruce. 



2 See Sargent, Garden and Forest, ii. 472, f . 132. * See i. 8. 



EXPLANATION OF THE PLATE. 



Plate DCIX. Abies Fkaseki. 



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1. A branch with staminate flowers^ natural size. 



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2. A staminate flower, enlarged. 



3. An anther, front view, enlarged. 



4. An anther, seen from below, enlarged. 



.5. A branch with pistillate flowers, natural size. 



6. A bract of a pistillate flower, lower side, enlarged. 



7. A scale of a pistillate flower, upper side, with its bract and ovules, enlarged. 



8. A fruiting branch, natural size. 



9. A cone-scale, lower side, with its bract, natural size. 



10. A cone-scale, upper side, with its seeds and bract, natural size. 



11. Vertical section of a seed, enlarged. 



12. An embryo, enlarged. 



13. Cross section of a leaf magnified fifteen diameters. 



14. Winter-buds, natural size. 



15. A seedling plant, natural size. 



