104 PICE^, OR SPRUCE TREES 



more firmly to his magic carpet than do these young 

 leaves to their so-called cushions. 



The two great divisions of the Piceae are differen- 

 tiated by the shape of their leaves. While the true 

 Spruce Firs have four-angled, four-sided (tetragonal) 

 leaves, the Omoricas have only two-sided leaves, and 

 are flat-leaved like the Abies. As has been pointed 

 out before, this difference is easily ascertained by 

 rolling them between thumb and finger. We give 

 illustrations, two of each, of how a flat-leaved specimen 

 looks when cut transversely and enlarged by magnify- 

 ing process, and how a four-sided or tetragonal leaf 

 appears treated similarly. 



Flat-leaved, or 

 two-sided — e.g. 

 Webblana. 



TRANSVERSE SECTION OF LEAVES (MAGNIFIED). 



It will be seen by this that the difference that exists 

 between a paper-knife and kitchen roller, or, to pursue 

 our metaphor on more strictly analogous lines, between 

 a sawn two-inch plank and a naturally grown rounded 

 tree-stem, if subjected to the same process, is hardly 

 more pronounced. Most of these generic character- 

 istics appear in the table, pp. 280-282. We have 

 only to supplement them with the fact that on both 

 the male flowers are solitary and situated in the axils 

 of the top leaves, while the female flowers are solitary 

 and terminal — that is to say, growing at the end of 

 the branches. And of the cones we would add, in the 

 case of the Omorica group, at times, when for instance 

 they grow in clusters (as on the Omorica species 



