108 



SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 



CONIFEBtE. 



The bark of the trunk of young trees is thin, smooth, pale gray, and conspicuously marked by the 

 swollen resin chambers ; on older trees it becomes, especially near the ground, sometimes nearly half an 

 inch in thickness, and is reddish brown and much broken into small irregular plates separating on the 

 surface into thin scales. The winter-buds are nearly globose and from an eighth to a quarter of an 

 inch in diameter, with lustrous dark orange-green scales more or less tinged with red toward the apex. 

 The branchlets are slender, and when they first appear are pale yellow-green and coated with fine 

 pubescence which does not disappear for two or three years ; during their second season they are light 

 gray tinged with red, and, gradually growing darker, are often when four or five years old tinged 

 with purple and more or less lustrous. On young trees and on sterile branches of old trees the 

 leaves are linear-lanceolate, straight, and, spreading at nearly right angles to the branch, are remote or 

 crowded ; and on the upper branches of older trees they are often broadest above the middle, usually 

 crowded, incurved and almost erect, and completely cover the upper side of the branchlets ; ^ at the 



L 



apex they are rounded or obtusely short-pointed and on vigorous young trees occasionally emarginate, 

 or toward the top of the tree, especially on its leading shoot, they are acute or acuminate, with short 

 or elongated rigid callous tips 3 they are dark green and lustrous on the upper surface, marked on the 

 lower surface with bands of from four to eight but usually of six rows of stomata, which, silvery white 

 and very conspicuous during the first season, lose much of their whiteness in their second year 3 the 

 leaves are from half an inch in length on cone-bearing branches to an inch and a quarter on the 

 sterile branches of young trees, and are nearly one sixteenth of an inch in width, their hypoderm 

 cells, which are not numerous, being chiefly confined to the edges and the keel. The staminate flowers 

 are oblong-cylindrical and about a quarter of an inch long, with yellow anthers more or less deeply 

 tinged with reddish purple; and the pistillate flowers are oblong-cylindrical and about an inch in 

 length, with nearly orbicular purple scales much shorter than their oblong-obovate serrulate pale 

 yellow-green bracts, which at the broad apex are somewhat emarginate and abruptly contracted into 

 long slender recurved tips. The cones are oblong-cylindrical, gradually narrowed to the rounded apex, 

 puberulous, dark rich purple in color, from two and a half to four inches long and from an inch to an 

 inch and a quarter thick, with scales which are usually rather longer than they are broad and generally 

 almost twice as long as their bracts, although occasionally the ends of the bracts protrude from the 

 scales of the mature cone. The seeds are about a quarter of an inch in length and rather shorter than 

 their light brown lustrous wings. 



From the interior of the Labrador peninsula, in about latitude 56° north, Abies halsamea^ 

 ranging southeastward, reaches the Atlantic coast near Cape Harrison, a degree farther south, and 

 extends southwestward to the shores of Hudson Bay, near the mouth of the Great Whale River ; ^ 

 west of Hudson Bay it ranges from latitude 54° north to northern Manitoba, and, crossing by the hills 

 of western Manitoba, the basin of the Saskatchewan, near Cumberland House, to the valley of the 



* Two forms of Ahies halsamea, distinguished by Mr. Reginald 

 C. Robbins of Boston in the region about Moosehead Lake, Maine, 

 are probably generally distributed in the northeastern states ; in 

 the first the leaves are crowded along the upper sides of the 

 branches by the strong twisting of their bases, and in the other 

 they are less crowded, longer, more distichously spreading, obtuse 

 and often emarginate even on upper branches, of tougher texture 

 and of a darker and richer shade of green. The form with crowded 

 leaves is a much more rapid-growing and usually a taller tree, 

 generally inhabiting dense forests and soon deprived of its lower 

 branches, while the form with remote spreading leaves grows more 

 slowly, is usually furnished to the ground with branches, and com- 

 monly inhabits the borders of pastures and other open places. 

 The two forms, however, often grow side by side under what 

 appear to be precisely similar conditions. The fast-growing tree 



with crowded leaves is the only one cut in the neighborhood of 

 Moosehead Lake for lumber. 



An interesting form of the Balsam Fir, which reproduces itself 

 from seeds, derived originally from the Woolf River region of 

 Wisconsin, has been cultivated for several years in the Douglas 

 Nurseries at Waukegan, Illinois. It is distinguished from the 

 ordinary form of the Balsam Fir by its longer and more crowded 

 leaves, sometimes an inch and a quarter long on sterile branches, 

 and by its longer cones, which are often four and a half inches in 

 length. This Fir, which is of unusually compact habit, promises 

 to retain its lower branches more persistently than the ordinary 

 Balsam Fir, and to be more valuable for the decoration of parks 

 and gardens. (See Garden and Forest, v. 274.) 



2 See Bell, The Scottish Geographical Magazine, xiii. 283 {The 

 Geographical Distribution of Forest Trees in Canada). 



