90 SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. conifers. 



occasionally almost black. The leaves are borne in clusters of two, with loose scarious sheaths from one 

 quarter to nearly one third of an inch in length, their inner scales falling during the first summer or 

 autumn and leaving only the narrow bases of the sheaths, which thicken and become almost black and 

 fall with the leaves, usually in their seventh or eighth year ; they are acute with short callous tips, 

 finely and sharply serrate, dark green, stomatiferous with from six to ten rows of deep-set stomata on 

 each face, from an inch to an inch and a half long and about one twenty-fourth of an inch wide, and 

 contain two fibro-vascular bundles and one or two parenchymatous resin passages surrounded by 

 strengthening cells, which also occur in a single nearly continuous layer under the epidermis. 1 The 

 staminate flowers are borne in short crowded spikes and are cylindrical and about half an inch long, 

 with orange-red anthers terminating in semiorbicular nearly entire crests, and are surrounded by invo- 

 lucres of six bracts. The pistillate flowers are subterminal or rarely lateral, clustered or in pairs, erect 

 or nearly horizontal, borne on stout peduncles covered by ovate acute dark chestnut-brown bracts, and 

 subcylindrical, with orange-red ovate scales gradually narrowed into elongated tips. During their first 

 winter the young cones are oval, spreading or erect, and from one half to three quarters of an inch 

 in length, with much thickened light red-brown scales produced into long slender points ; and when 

 ripe in the following autumn they are oval or subcylindrical, usually very oblique at the base, horizontal, 

 often clustered, light green, and from three quarters of an inch to two inches in length, with thin 

 slightly concave scales rounded at the apex, their exposed parts being transversely keeled and slightly 

 thickened into narrow oblong dark umbos armed with long slender more or less recurved often decid- 

 uous prickles, or toward the base of the cone, and especially on the upper side, the exposed portions 

 of the scales are developed into thick mammillate knobs ; at maturity they become light yellow-brown 

 and lustrous, sometimes opening and exposing the bright red-purple inner portion of the scales, and 

 losing their seeds as soon as ripe ; or more often they are serotinous, remaining unopened on the 

 branches and preserving the vitality of their seeds for many years, although most of them eventually 

 open before falling and continue to cover for many seasons longer the stems and branches. The seeds 

 are oblique at the apex, acute below, dark red-brown mottled with black, and about one sixteenth of an 

 inch in length, with a thin brittle coat and an embryo with four or five cotyledons ; their wings are thin, 

 pale brown, widest above the base, gradually tapering toward the oblique apex, and half an inch long. 



Rimes contorta is distributed from Alaska, where it grows near the coast as far north, at least, as 

 the shores of Cross Sound, 2 usually in sphagnum-covered bogs, southward in the immediate neigh- 

 borhood of the coast to the valley of the Albion River in Mendocino County, California, south of 

 the northern boundary of the United States, generally inhabiting sand dunes and barrens, or occa- 

 sionally, near the shores of Puget Sound, the margins of tide pools and sphagnum-covered swamps. 

 Spreading inland, it ascends the coast ranges and western slopes of the Cascade Mountains, 3 where it 

 is not common, and where it gradually changes its habit and appearance, the thick dark deeply 

 furrowed bark of the coast form being found only near the ground, that which is higher on the stem 

 being thin, light-colored, and more inclined to separate into scales, while the leaves are often longer 

 and broader. In British Columbia, Oregon, and Washington such trees are found, either singly or 

 in small groves, scattered over the coast ranges and on the western slopes of the Cascade Mountains 

 up to elevations of four or five thousand feet above the sea. Farther east they grow taller, their 

 bark is thinner, and their leaves broader, and insensibly through innumerable forms the Pine of the 

 wind-swept coast dunes passes into the Lodge Pole or Tamarack Pine 4 of the interior. 5 This is a tree, 



1 Coulter & Rose, Bot. Gazette, xi. 305. the best support for the Indian tepees, while in California it is as 



2 Rothrock, Smithsonian Rep. 1867, 455 (Fl. Alaska). — Meehan, generally known as Tamarac, from the resemblance of the narrow 

 Proc. Phil. Acad. 1884, 92. — F. Kurz, Bot. Jahrb. xix. 425 (Fl. spire-like heads which it produces on the high Sierras to those of 

 Chilcatgebietes). — M. W. Gorman, Pittonia, iii. 69. the Larch-tree of the eastern states. 



3 Hall, Bot. Gazette, ii. 94. — Henderson, Zoe, ii. 207. 5 Pinus contorta, var. Murrayana, Engelmann, Brewer &f Watson 



4 In the northern Rocky Mountains this tree is almost universally Bot. Cal. ii. 126 (1880). — Coulter, Man. Rocky Mt. Bot. 433. — 

 called Lodge Pole Pine, because its long slender stems afforded 



