NOTES AND QUERIES. 159 



too open woods. Grown under such circumstances, they are ill- 

 shaped, low, branchy, and consequently knotty. Of all our forest 

 trees the silver fir requires the highest density of stock to produce 

 well-shaped, clean-grown stems, with the narrow annual rings 

 which indicate the best technical quality in coniferous timber. 

 M. Boppe, in his Technologieforestiere, says of this tree that its 

 large size, its exceptional elasticity, and its abundance, cause its 

 timber to be very extensively used in the construction of build- 

 ings, as in the wood-work of roofs and the joists of floors, while 

 planks and battens of it serve innumerable purposes. 



Spruce. — Of this timber M. Boppe says that it is lighter but 

 softer than that of the silver fir; it is applied to the same uses 

 and is valued more or less than that of the silver fir according to 

 the locality in which it is grown. In low situations, by reason 

 of the rapidity of its growth, it is soft, spongy, and inferior; 

 whereas near the highest limits of the zone it occupies it is of 

 excellent quality, and its price then exceeds that of the silver fir 

 by one-fourth or one-fifth. It is a first-class wood for the con- 

 struction of buildings. It yields excellent sawyers' timber, but 

 when grown as a too open crop the planks are found to be very 

 knotty, and show numerous plugs of dead wood (loose knots) 

 which easily fall out. 



It is, of course, well known that the bulk of the so-called 

 "white wood" imported into this country from northern Europe 

 is the timber of the spruce tree; but "white wood" also includes 

 timber of the silver fir. 



Larch on Sakhalin, 



Mr C. H. Hawes, who recently visited the island, writes 

 that he was struck by the height of the larch trees (Larix 

 dahurica, Tarcz.) growing on the lowlands bordering the river 

 Tim, where he found by rough measui-ements that the stem 

 of one of them was about 145 feet long. The tree appeared 

 to attain its greatest height about a hundred or more miles 

 from the mouth of the river, where the level of the country 

 was neither so low as the tundra of the coast nor so high as the 

 hilly or mountainous region of the interior. It is the principal 

 tree of the north-eastern portion of the island, the region which 

 he explored. On the south-western side it is, however, found in 



