112 SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. conifers. 



close thin sheaths at first pale chestnut-brown below, scarious above, and about an inch in length, 

 and in their second year about half an inch long, dark below, and loose and lacerate on the margins, 

 and are persistent with the leaves, which fall during their third year; the leaves are slender, stiff, 

 slightly twisted, sharp-pointed with callous tips, closely serrulate, pale green and slightly glaucous, from 

 six to nine inches long, about one sixteenth of an inch broad, and stomatiferous with from ten to 

 twelve rows of large stomata on each face ; they contain two fibro-vascular bundles, from three to five 

 peripheral resin ducts placed irregularly, mostly near the angles of the leaf, 1 and surrounded by small 

 strengthening cells, which also occur under the epidermis, usually in several interrupted layers and in 

 clusters at the angles. The staminate flowers are crowded in short spikes and are cylindrical, incurved, 

 from three quarters of an inch to an inch long and about three eighths of an inch thick, with yellow 

 anthers terminating in nearly orbicular denticulate crests, and are surrounded by involucres of from 

 eight to ten ovate lanceolate lustrous dark chestnut-brown fimbriate involucral bracts, those of the 

 lower pair being much shorter than the others and strongly keeled. The pistillate flowers are lateral 

 below the apex of the growing shoot, which is often five or six inches long before they appear, and are 

 oblong, from one third to one half of an inch in length, solitary, in pairs or in clusters of three, with 

 ovate lanceolate yellow scales gradually narrowed into long slender straight or incurved tips and minute 

 orbicular bracts, and are raised on short peduncles, covered by broadly ovate dark chestnut-brown 

 acuminate bracts pale and scarious on the margins. The flowers open from the middle of March on 

 the coast of the Gulf of Mexico to the first of May in the middle Atlantic states. The young cones, 

 after the pollination of their ovules, increase rapidly in size for a few days and then slowly during 

 the remainder of the season ; 2 in their first winter they are erect or spreading, ovate-oblong, light 

 reddish brown, about an inch in length and a quarter of an inch in breadth, with broadly ovate 

 thickened scales rather abruptly narrowed into acicular incurved tips, and when fully grown the 

 following October they are lateral, nearly sessile, ovate-oblong or broadly conical, usually about three 

 but sometimes four or five inches in length, from an inch and a half to two inches in breadth, and 

 light reddish brown, with thin slightly concave scales rounded at the apex and dark red or purple below, 

 their exposed parts being thickened into low knobs transversely keeled and armed with short stout 

 straight or reflexed prickles ; they open slowly, discharging their seeds during the autumn and winter, 

 and usually remain on the branches until the end of another year. The seeds are rhomboidal, full and 

 rounded, with a thin dark brown tuberculate coat blotched with black and produced into broad thin 

 lateral margins, and an embryo with six or seven cotyledons, and are surrounded to the base by the 

 narrow border of their wings, which are thin and fragile, pale brown and lustrous, broadest above the 

 middle, an inch long and about a quarter of an inch wide. 



Pinus Tceda finds its most northerly home near Cape May in New Jersey, 3 and is common in the 

 lower part of Newcastle County, Delaware, extending thence to the District of Columbia and southward 

 through the maritime part of Virginia, and through eastern and middle North Carolina to Cape Malabar 

 and the shores of Tampa Bay, Florida, and westward through South Carolina and Georgia and the 

 eastern Gulf states to the bottom-lands of the Mississippi River, spreading north a few miles beyond 

 the boundary of Alabama and Mississippi into southern Tennessee ; west of the Mississippi River it 

 ranges from southeastern Arkansas, where the northern limit of its distribution is near Little Rock on 

 the Arkansas River, and the southwestern part of the Indian Territory, through western Louisiana to 

 the shores of the Gulf of Mexico and through eastern Texas to the valley of the Colorado River, finding 

 its most southwesterly station in an isolated forest 4 in Bastrop County. 



1 Coulter & Rose, Bot. Gazette, xi. 307. Bank, on the west side of Cape May, about three miles from the 



2 Mohr, Bull. No. 13, Div. Forestry U. S. Dept. Agric. 115 {The beach. (See Garden and Forest, x. 192.) 



Timber Pines of the Southern U. S.). i Fifty years ago low hills in Bastrop County, central Texas, 



3 A single tree of Pinus Tceda was found by Gifford Pinchot and were covered with forests of Pinus Tceda, which also spread into 

 H. C. Graves in the spring of 1897, on the Price farm at Town the adjacent counties. Extensive lumbering operations were car- 



