132 SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 



CONIFERS. 



dark brown and lustrous, their scales being armed with slender straight or incurved spines ; when fully 

 grown in the autumn they are single or in clusters of two or of three, reflexed on short stout peduncles, 

 from subglobose to oblong-ovate, dark green, from an inch and a half to two inches long and about 

 three quarters of an inch thick, with thin slightly concave scales rounded at the apex, their exposed 

 portions, which are only slightly thickened and inconspicuously transversely keeled, terminating in 

 small dark flat umbos armed with minute straight or incurved usually deciduous prickles ; they are 

 reddish brown and rather lustrous, and dark purple on the upper side of the base of the scales when 

 they open and shed their seeds in the autumn, and remain on the branches for two or three years 

 longer. The seeds are nearly triangular, full and rounded on the sides, somewhat roughened and 

 ridged below, and about an eighth of an inch in length, with a thin dark gray coat mottled with black 

 and an embryo with five or six cotyledons ; their wings are thin and fragile, broadest below the middle, 

 dark brown and lustrous, about five eighths of an inch long and a quarter of an inch wide. 1 



Pinus glabra is distributed from the valley of the lower Santee River in South Carolina to middle 

 and northwestern Florida and to the valley of Pearl River in eastern Louisiana, being usually found 

 only in the neighborhood of the coast, where it grows, singly or in small colonies, on low terraces which 

 rise above river-swamps subject to frequent overflow, and where it is associated with Magnolias, Gums, 

 Hickories, and Beeches, and with the short-leaved and Loblolly Pines, flourishing while young in their 

 dense shade, but finally pushing its stately crown into the light above its associates ; it is comparatively 

 rare except in the region between the Chatahoochee and the Choctawhatchee Rivers in northwestern 

 Florida, where it probably attains its greatest size and often covers areas of considerable extent, soon 

 occupying abandoned clearings in the forest. 



One of the largest of the Pine-trees of eastern North America, Pinus glabra has little economic 

 value, although it is occasionally cut for fuel and the saw-mill. 2 The wood is light, soft, not strong, 

 brittle, very close-grained, and not durable ; it is light brown, with thick nearly white sapwood, and 

 contains broad bands of small summer cells, few rather small resin passages, and many obscure 

 medullary rays. The specific gravity of the absolutely dry wood is 0.3931, a cubic foot weighing 

 24.50 pounds. 



Pinus glabra appears to have been first noticed by Thomas Walter 3 who published the earliest 

 description of it in 1788. Long overlooked by later botanists, it was not recognized again until three 

 quarters of a century later, when an account of it was published 4 by Mr. H. W. Ravenel, 5 who found it 

 near Walter's original locality. 



i Pinus glabra begins to produce flowers and seeds at the age of Parish, South Carolina, where he had a plantation on the banks of 



twelve or fifteen years, being most prolific from its twentieth to its the Santee River, and where he died in 1788, at the age of about 



fortieth year. The seeds germinate in the fall or at the beginning forty-eight years, being buried at his own request in his garden, 



of the following spring, the seedlings being often six inches high where he had cultivated many of the plants described in his Flora. 



early in April. Trees twenty years old are generally from thirty These meagre facts were gathered nearly fifty years ago by Mr. 



to thirty-five feet tall, with stems from four to four and * half Ravenel, from his tombstone erected by his only surviving chil- 



inches in diameter, and usually attain their full growth at the age dren, Ann and Mary. (See Ravenel, Proc. Elliott Soc. i. 53. - See 



of from sixty to seventy-five years (Mohr, Bull. No. 13, Div. Forestry also F. A. Porcher, Southern Quarterly Review, 1854 [History and 



U. S. Dept. Agric. 129 [The Timber Pines of the Southern U. S.]). Social Sketch of Craven County, So. Carolina].) Walter's herba- 



2 See Mellichamp, Garden and Forest, ii. 15. rmm i s preserved in the British Museum. 



8 Little is known of Thomas Walter, the author of the Flora a Ravenel, I. c. 51. 



Caroliniana, published in London in 1788. He was a native of 6 gee viii. 160. 

 Hampshire, in England, and for many years a resident of St. John's 



