116 SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. conifers. 



those of the inner ranks soon becoming reflexed on the lengthening shoots and falling from their bases, 

 which become much thickened and dark brown or often nearly black and roughen the stout branches 

 for years. The branchlets, which when they first appear are glabrous and bright green, during their 

 first winter are dull orange-color, and then gradually growing darker, especially on the upper side, 

 become dark gray-brown at the end of four or five years. The leaves are borne in clusters of three, 1 

 and when they first emerge from the sheaths these are half an inch long, thin and close, pale chestnut- 

 brown below and white and scarious above, but soon losing their inner scales become from an eighth to 

 a quarter of an inch in length, thick, close, and dark brown or often almost black, and fall with the 

 leaves during their second year ; the leaves stand out stiffly and at right angles with the branches and 

 are firm, sharply and closely serrulate, acuminate with callous tips, dark yellow-green, stomatiferous on 

 the three faces with many rows of deep-set stomata, and from three to five inches in length ; they contain 

 two fibro-vascular bundles, from three to seven resin ducts, several being often smaller than the others 

 and internal, surrounded by small strengthening cells, which also occur under the epidermis in bundles 

 or in a single layer, and are numerous and clustered in the angles of the leaf. 2 The staminate flowers 

 are produced in short crowded spikes and are cylindrical, flexuous, and about three quarters of an inch 

 long, with yellow anthers terminating in nearly orbicular entire crests, and are surrounded by from six 

 to eight involucral bracts. The pistillate flowers are lateral, often clustered and raised on short stout 

 peduncles covered with ovate oblong acute dark chestnut-brown bracts scarious on the margins, and are 

 subglobose and about an eighth of an inch long, their ovate light green scales being more or less 

 tinged with rose-color and contracted into long slender slightly spreading tips. The young cones 

 grow slowly during their first season, and in the winter they are erect or spreading and about half 

 an inch long, their much thickened scales terminating in long thin straight or reflexed spines ; 

 beginning to grow the following spring before the expansion of the branch-buds, they turn dark green 

 with the exception of the light brown umbos, and attain their full size in the early autumn, when they 

 are ovate-conical or ovate, nearly sessile, often clustered, from one to three and a half inches long, with 

 thin flat scales rounded or slightly narrowed at the apex, their exposed portions being somewhat 

 thickened and conspicuously transversely keeled, with small dark elevated umbos terminating in slender 

 recurved rigid prickles ; slowly opening and shedding their seeds throughout the autumn and winter, 

 they turn from green to light brown on the exposed portions and upper side of the scales, and dull 

 mahogany-red on the lower side, often remaining on the branches and on the stems of young trees for 

 ten or twelve years. The seeds are nearly triangular, full and rounded on the sides and about a 

 quarter of an inch long, with a thin dark brown mottled tuberculate coat and an embryo with from four 

 to six cotyledons ; their wings are broadest below the middle, gradually narrowed to the very oblique 

 apex, three quarters of an inch long and a third of an inch wide. 



Pinus rigida is distributed from the valley of the St. John's River in New Brunswick to the 

 northern shores of Lake Ontario, 3 where it is not abundant, southward through the Atlantic states to 

 northern Georgia, crossing the Alleghany Mountains to their western foothills in West Virginia, 

 Kentucky, and Tennessee. An inhabitant of sandy plains and dry gravelly uplands, or less frequently 

 of cold deep swamps, the Pitch Pine is very abundant on the New England coast south of the Bay of 

 Massachusetts, in southern New Jersey, where it forms extensive forests, 4 on the Delaware peninsula, 5 

 through the middle districts of Virginia and of North and South Carolina, and in the interior wherever 

 it finds the barren soil on which it is able to maintain itself against trees requiring more generous 

 nourishment for the development of their full vigor, often ascending to the upper slopes of the 

 Alleghany Mountains of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. 



1 On vigorous stump shoots the first foliage leaves are occasion- 3 Brunet, Cat. Veg. Lig. Can. 57. — Macoun, Cat. Can. PI. 467. 

 ally borne in clusters of two, four, or five. * See Garden and Forest, i. 59. — Sargent, Garden and Forest, I 



2 Coulter & Rose, Bot. Gazette, xi. 307. — Bastin & Trimble, Am. 166, f . — Gifford, Rep. Geolog. Surv. New Jersey, 1894, 251. 

 Jour. Pharm. 65, f. 8. s R ot hrock, Forest Leaves, ii. 83. f. 



