90 ABIES, OR SILVER FIRS 



winters of 191 5-16 and 191 6- 17, and after several 

 quite brisk struggles for existence, has now achieved 

 the not very giddy height of twelve inches, but other- 

 wise the presentation of an appearance that you may 

 describe as robust. Yet there is a memento mori 

 atmosphere that clings to the story of the tree. Like 

 shadows they come into the story of our trees here, 

 and like shadows time after time have they dis- 

 appeared. The likes and unlikes are called attention 

 to in the Table, and the fact noted that the Sacha- 

 linensis has some seven or eight stomatiferous bands, 

 the A. Sibirica only four or five. 



A. Mariesii. — ^The Alpine Fir of Central Japan 

 was discovered in 1878 by C. Maries, and is regarded 

 as rare. It is accounted among the more hopeless 

 of those plants upon which persuasion has been 

 brought to bear to do their best under the circum- 

 stances of a strange land, and possibly in some cases 

 of a strange altitude. There are, we think, one or 

 two more that have not met the eye of the authorities, 

 and that have done better than they are generally 

 given credit for. The dark-looking branchlets are 

 covered over with the rustiest of dark-looking choco- 

 late-coloured pubescence that ever covered twig of 

 tree, matted and tangled, and with as tell-tale a 

 surface as the goat-skin which deceived the patriarch 

 Isaac. If more tokens were called for to complete 

 its identity, we should compare its outward appear- 

 ance to a short-leaved Nordmanniana, so short that 

 it has the resembling look of a Hemlock Spruce. Yet 

 a Nordmanniana, with its shiny, grey-brown, smooth- 

 looking twigs and its only scattered pubescence, has 

 little in real common with the dark, hirsute-twigged 

 Mariesii. Nor, for the matter of that, has the Mariesii 

 much in common with the smoother, less pubescent, 

 twigged Veitchii. 



