24 SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. conifers. 



cells under nearly the whole epidermis ; they contain usually two but sometimes only a single dorsal 

 resin duct, 1 and are serrate with small minute teeth ; the leaves fall partly during their third and partly 

 during their fourth season. The staminate flowers are oval, about a third of an inch long, with anthers 

 which terminate in short crests or knobs, and are surrounded by eight involucral bracts. The pistillate 

 flowers are clustered, oblong-cylindric, and about half an inch in length, with thin scales, and are raised 

 on stout peduncles nearly as long as the flowers and clothed with ovate-lanceolate long-pointed 

 chestnut-brown bracts conspicuously keeled on the back, one third of an inch in length, and persistent 

 during the season. In the autumn the young cones are from three quarters of an inch to nearly an 

 inch long, brown tinged with red, erect on stout peduncles usually an inch in length ; they become 

 reflexed when they begin to grow in early spring, and ripen and shed their seeds late in the summer or 

 in the early autumn, when they are light green, 2 cylindrical, pointed, often curved, from five to eleven 

 inches long and about two inches thick, and are borne on stout incurved peduncles from an inch to 

 an inch and a half in length ; their scales are thin, oblong-obovate, from an inch to an inch and a 

 half long, about three quarters of an inch wide, and slightly thickened and smooth toward the apex, 

 which is gradually narrowed, rounded, and tipped with a small slightly thickened pointed dark umbo ; 

 the cones fall during the winter and spring, the exposed portions of the scales having become light 

 reddish brown and their bases dark dull red in the autumn. The seeds are narrowed at both ends, 

 one third of an inch long and about one third the length of the pointed wings, and are covered by a 

 pale red-brown coat mottled with black, and produced into a narrow obscure wing-like margin j the 

 cotyledons vary from six to nine in number. 



The western White Pine is distributed through mountain forests from the basin of the Columbia 

 River in southern British Columbia to Vancouver Island, 3 southward along the western slopes of the 

 Rocky Mountains' to northern Montana, and to the Bitter Root Mountains of Idaho, westward along 

 the mountain ranges of northern Idaho and Washington, reaching the sea-level near the shores of 

 the Straits of Fuca, and southward along the Cascade Mountains and the Washington and Oregon 

 coast ranges, extending eastward in Oregon to the high mountains east of Goose Lake, 4 and southward 

 along both slopes of the California Sierras to the ridge between Little Kern and Kern Rivers in 

 latitude 36° 25'. 5 In northern Idaho the western White Pine grows to its largest size, and is most 

 abundant, often forming an important part of the forest at elevations of from two thousand to two thou- 

 sand five hundred feet above the sea on the bottom-lands of streams tributary to Lake Pend Oreille ; 

 farther east, in Montana, it is less abundant and smaller ; in the interior of British Columbia it is not 

 abundant, although it sometimes is large ; it is scattered in considerable numbers through the coniferous 

 forests of the coast ranges of British Columbia and through the interior of Vancouver Island ; and it 

 is not rare on the Cascade Range, where it ascends to elevations of five or six thousand feet, nor on the 

 California Sierras, first appearing singly or in small groups along the upper margin of the Fir forest, 

 and attaining its noblest dimensions in California at elevations of about ten thousand feet above the 

 sea, where trees ninety feet high, with trunks five or six feet in diameter, sometimes occur, and resist 

 for centuries, with their massive trunks and short contorted branches, the fiercest Sierra gales. 6 



The wood of Pinus monticola is very light, soft, not strong, and close and straight-grained ; it is 

 light brown or red, with thin nearly white sapwood, and contains numerous obscure medullary rays. 

 The specific gravity of the absolutely dry wood is 0.3908, a cubic foot weighing 24.35 pounds. It is 

 sometimes manufactured into lumber, especially in northern Idaho and Montana, and is used for the 

 same purposes as white pine in the eastern states. 



1 Coulter & Rose, Bot. Gazette, xi. 261. 4 During the summer of 1896 Dr. E. Hart Merriam found Pinus 



2 A form with purple cones and rather broader leaves, known monticola growing on the high peaks of the Warner Range east of 

 only from a tree cultivated in Scotland, is the Pinus porphyrocarpa Goose Lake, Oregon. 



of A. Murray. 5 f este Lieutenant M. F. Davis, U. S. Army. 



8 G. M. Dawson, Can. Nat. n. ser. ix. 328. — Macoun, Cat. Can. 6 See portrait of Pinus monticola on the mountains above the 



PI- 464. Yosemite Valley, California, in Garden and Forest, v. f. 1. 



