A LABRADOR SPRING 



slow. The other tree was on the edge of the 

 forest close to a marsh, where conditions for 

 growth were so favourable that it had attained 

 a diameter of fifty-eight inches in ninety-nine 

 years. 



A white spruce stump close to the house at 

 Mingan with a circumference of seventy inches 

 two feet from the ground had lived 132 years; 

 there were thirty-seven rings in the last inch. 

 Another, a veteran, that had been cut down 

 twenty inches from the ground on Mingan 

 Island and left where it fell, had been fifty-five 

 feet tall. Its stump sixty-five inches in circum- 

 ference and eighteen inches in diameter was 

 sound to the very centre, and showed 226 rings. 

 Between its 5oth and iSoth years it had grown 

 with uniform rapidity, as the rings were broad, 

 but after that its growth was slow, and in the 

 last three-fourths inch of its circumference it 

 showed forty-six rings. If we suppose the tree 

 had been cut down within a year, it must have 

 begun life in the year 1683, or only three years 

 after the founding of the Hudson's Bay Com- 

 pany. 



The distinction between the three different 

 species of spruces is at times confusing. The 



216 



