p. PONDEROSA, JEFFREYI, TUBERCULATxV 39 



this group. Whether it is that they have endured 

 the conditions of our climate with more success than 

 other trees imported about the same time, or whether 

 then- presence is due to the fact that those who 

 planted them, when they preferred an off-hand 

 request, perhaps on some visit to a nursery garden, 

 and asked in all their innocence for a rarer Pine to 

 plant somewhere or other, on some newly enclosed 

 garden or ground, mead, or meadow, were, so to speak, 

 served across the counter with the readiest-at-hand 

 stock-in-trade article of the nurserymen, which often 

 turned out to be the subject of our discourse, the 

 P. Ponderosa (and which often, by the way, was 

 distributed under the name of P. Benthamii), I am 

 unable to do more than surmise. Those that it has 

 been my fate to see have all exhibited the curious 

 phase of curved and tortuous branches. 



The different colour of the shoots {vide Table), and 

 the larger cones, seem to be the best points to make 

 for, to decide between the Ponderosa and Jeffreyi. 

 Both seem to depend for success upon a dry soil, and 

 to prefer a dr}^ climate. 



P. TuBERCULATA and the two-leaved P. Muricata 

 have one point in common, and that is to be noticed 

 in their cone-clusters clinging persistently on the 

 large-sized branches. As the P. Tuberculata is a 

 three-leaf-in-a-cluster Pine and the P. Muricata a 

 two-leaf-in-a-cluster Pine, the problem of distinguish- 

 ing the one from the other is most happily reduced 

 to an easy process. In the case of the P. Tuberculata 

 these cone-clusters appear in the very early stages of 

 life in the tree. Not content with crowding them- 

 selves on the older branches, they also invade the 

 main trunk of the tree, until at times they actually 

 become embedded in it. For this reason the tree 

 appropriately receives its name Tuberculata, a word 



