HABITS OF LARCH 137 



they plant, and so act in an obedience to a golden 

 rule. 



The Larch is by nature a cold-country tree. From 

 green forests in northern lands it hails. 



In its characteristics it is a plagiarist of deepest 

 dye. In the more essential part of those charac- 

 teristics it shows no originality, unless it be that the 

 Larch is the basement t}'pe, and that these others 

 undermentioned as prototypes should offer submission 

 to him, not he to them. 



In its two kinds of branches, long and arrested, in 

 the crow^ded fascicles of its leaves, produced on spurs, 

 tufts, or short-arrested branches, in the position of 

 its resin canals and undivided fibrovascular bundle 

 of its leaf structure, it resembles the Cedars, and very 

 properly joins their family circle under the family 

 name Lariceae. 



So far right, but when it produces cones with 

 persistent scales like the Piceae, which are at the same 

 time of upright position, as are the Abies, and when 

 its flowers are as the Tsugas, the charge of non- 

 originality cannot be said to have been sounded in 

 vain. If it lays claim to any individuality among 

 these evergreen trees that it has taken its various 

 cues of character from, it is that, unlike any of them, 

 it holds to deciduous ideas and habits, and they do 

 not. Perhaps it is because it hails from northern lands, 

 with their winters of daylightless days and prolonged 

 nights, that it feels, like many northern men and beasts, 

 a natural inclination to take to hibernating ways, 

 and preparatory to that, to follow the custom of 

 civilization accredited to the former, of taking off 

 its clothes before the operation. At the earliest sign 

 of spring it is the first of trees to hurry them on again 

 and set a good example of early rising. 



L. Leptolepis (Japanese Larch). — ^The Common 



