152 SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. conifers. 



branches for several years longer. The leaves are borne in crowded clusters of three, forming dense 

 tufts at the very ends of the branches ; their sheaths, which consist of eight pairs of bud-scales, are 

 thin during their first year, pale orange-color, and loose and scarious on the free margins, and later 

 become dark brown, falling with the leaves at the end of the second year ; the leaves are serrulate, 

 acute with short callous tips, soft and flexible, pendulous and dark green ; on old trees they are usually 

 about eight inches, but on young and vigorous trees generally from twelve to eighteen inches in length, 

 and are about one sixteenth of an inch in width ; they contain two fibro-vascular bundles, usually from 

 three to five, generally internal resin ducts occasionally surrounded with strengthening cells which, 

 however, mostly occur on the ventral side of the fibro-vascular region, and many bands of deep-set 

 stomata on their three faces. 1 The flowers are produced in very early spring before the appearance of 

 the new leaves, the staminate in short dense clusters from the axils of the lowest scales of the branch- 

 bud before it has begun to lengthen, the pistillate subterminal just below the apex of the lengthening 

 shoot and usually in pairs or in clusters of three or four, the staminate and pistillate flowers being 

 occasionally produced on the same branch. The staminate flowers are cylindrical, incurved, from two 

 to two and a half inches in length and about a quarter of an inch in thickness, with dark rose-purple 

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

 ten to twelve bracts ; withering, they remain for several months on the branches. The pistillate flowers 

 are raised on short stout peduncles covered by numerous membranaceous bracts scarious, spreading, 

 and often reflexed at the apex, and are oval and about a third of an inch in length, with broadly ovate 

 dark purple scales gradually narrowed into slender tips, and nearly orbicular bracts as large as the base 

 of the scales. As soon as their ovules are fertilized the young cones grow rapidly for a few weeks, 

 becoming about two thirds of an inch in length, and then increase very slowly, remaining erect during 

 the winter, when they are not more than an inch in length, and dark red-brown ; beginning to 

 grow again in early spring, they soon become horizontal ; and when they have attained their full size 

 in the autumn they are cylindrical or conical-oblong, slightly curved, nearly sessile, horizontal or 

 pendent, dark green, with chestnut-brown umbos and prickles, from six to ten inches long and 

 about two inches thick, with thin flat scales rounded at the apex, their exposed portions, which 

 are conspicuously transversely keeled and somewhat thickened, terminating in elevated transversely 

 compressed slightly incurved dark umbos armed with small reflexed prickles ; turning dull brown when 

 fully ripe, the base of the scales being now dark rich purple on the lower side and reddish brown and 

 lustrous on the upper, they open and shed their seeds late in the autumn, and remaining on the 

 branches until the latter part of the following winter, leave in falling a few of their basal scales 

 attached to the stem. The seeds are almost triangular, full and rounded on the sides, prominently 

 ridged and about half an inch long, with a thin pale coat marked with dark blotches on the upper side 

 and a sweet slightly resinous embryo with from seven to ten cotyledons ; their wings are thin, fragile, 

 pale reddish brown and lustrous, widest near the middle, gradually narrowed to the very oblique apex, 

 about an inch and three quarters long and seven sixteenths of an inch wide. 



Pinus palust?*is, which is chiefly confined to a belt of late tertiary sands and gravels stretching 

 along the coast of the south Atlantic and Gulf states and rarely more than one hundred and twenty- 

 five miles in width, is distributed from the extreme southeastern part of Virginia 2 southward to Cape 

 Canaveral and the shores of Tampa Bay, Florida, and westward to the uplands east of the bottoms of 

 the Mississippi River, 3 in Alabama extending northward to latitude 34° 30' north and ascending the 



1 Coulter & Rose, Bot. Gazette, xi. 309. — Bastin & Trimble, Am. the Mississippi River into three divisions, based on their topo- 

 Jour. Pkarm. lxviii. 74, f. 14. graphical features and on the mechanical and physical conditions 



2 Pinus palustris extends only a few miles north of the southern of their soils. 



boundary of Virginia into the southeastern counties. (See Ruffin, (1.) The coast plain, an imperfectly drained tidal region of 



RusseWs Magazine, iv. 35.) low Pine barrens, extending inland from ten to thirty miles and 



3 Dr. Charles Mohr, who has carefully studied the distribution covered with open forests of the Long-leaved Pine, interrupted by 

 of Pinus palustris, separates the great maritime Pine belt east of inlets from the sea, brackish marshes, and numerous swamps bear- 



