58 SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. BETULACEZ. 
and at the base of younger trees it is brown tinged with red, and separates irregularly into large plates 
covered with thin and sometimes silvery scales. Higher on the trunks of old trees, which like the base 
of the large branches are nearly surrounded by broad irregular horizontal nearly black bands, on young 
stems and on the large limbs, the bark is thin, creamy white and lustrous on the outer surface, bright 
orange-color on the inner, marked with long narrow horizontal slightly darker colored raised lenticels, 
and separates freely into thin papery layers which, when first exposed to the light, are pale orange-color. 
The branchlets are slender, and, when they first appear, are light green, slightly viscid, marked with 
scattered orange-colored oblong lenticels, and covered with long pale hairs; through the summer they 
are dark orange-color and glabrous or pubescent, and conspicuously marked with pale lenticels; during 
the first winter they are dull red, growing gradually a darker orange-brown and more lustrous for 
the next four or five years, and are then covered with the white papery bark of the older branches. 
The buds, when they are fully grown at midsummer, are ovate, acute, and about a quarter of an inch 
long, dark green, pubescent below the middle, and coated with resinous gum, and during the winter 
they are dark chestnut-brown, glabrous, and slightly resinous; in expanding, the inner scales, which 
are light brown and scarious, become strap-shaped, rounded at the apex, about half an inch in length 
and an eighth of an inch in breadth. The leaves are ovate, rather abruptly acuminate at the apex 
with short broad points, and coarsely, usually doubly and often very irregularly serrate with nearly 
triangular callous spreading teeth, except at the rounded or slightly cordate or abruptly wedge-shaped 
base ; when they unfold they are bright green, glandular-resinous, pubescent, and clothed below on the 
midribs and primary veins, and on the petioles, with long white hairs; at maturity they are thick and 
firm in texture, dull dark green on the upper surface, which is glandless or rarely marked, especially 
while young, with minute pale glands, and light yellow-green and glabrous or puberulous on the lower 
surface, which is furnished with small tufts of pale hairs in the axils of the primary veins, and is coated 
with minute black glands; they are from two to three inches long, and from one and a half to two 
inches wide, with slender yellow midribs raised and rounded on the upper side and marked, like the few 
remote prominent primary veins, with minute black glands, and conspicuous reticulate veinlets; they 
are borne on stout yellow petioles covered with black glands, much enlarged toward the base, flattened 
and obscurely grooved on the upper side, glabrous or pubescent, and from one half to three quarters of 
an inch in length, and turn a light clear yellow in the autumn before falling. The stipules are ovate, 
acute, ciliate on the margins with pale hairs, light green, and caducous. During the winter the 
staminate catkins, which are produced in two or three-flowered clusters, are from three quarters of an 
inch to an inch and a quarter in length, and about an eighth of an inch im thickness, with ovate acute 
nearly triangular slightly apiculate puberulous scales, light brown below the middle and dark red-brown 
above; and when they are fully grown, and the flowers open in early spring, they are from three and a 
half to four inches long and about a third of an inch thick. The pistillate catkins are from an inch to 
an inch and three quarters long, and about a sixteenth of an inch thick, with light green lanceolate 
scales, long-pointed and acute or rounded at the apex, and bright red styles; they are borne on slender 
glandular peduncles, bibracteolate with conspicuous acute scarious caducous bractlets, and from three 
quarters of an inch to an inch in length. The strobiles, which hang on slender stalks, are cylindrical, 
and about an inch and a half long and a third of an inch thick; their scales are glabrous, or rarely 
puberulous, cuneate at the base, and rather longer than broad, with short wide-spreading rounded 
lateral lobes. The nut is oval, about a sixteenth of an inch in length, and much narrower than its thin 
wing. 
The Canoe Birch is one of the most widely distributed trees of North America. From Labrador 
it ranges to the southern shores of Hudson’s Bay and to those of the Great Bear Lake, and to the 
valley of the Yukon River and the coast of Alaska, forming with the Aspen, the Larch, the Balsam 
Poplar, the Banksian Pine, the Black and the White Spruces, and the Balsam Fir, the great sub- 
arctic transcontinental forest ; and southward it ranges through all the forest region of the Dominion 
