474 ABIETIA. 



obliterated. Dr. Mayr states that the wood is very durable when 

 exposed to the weather, but not much used on account of the 

 difficulty of transport. 



PHILIP FitAxz VON SIEBOLD (17961866) was born at Wiirzburg in Bavaria, and 

 belonged to a family which has given several distinguished members to the medical 

 profession. He received a first-class education in his native town and obtained the 

 degree of Doctor in 1820. Two years afterwards he went to Java as medical officer in 

 the Dutch service, and that Government having decided upon dispatching a scientific 

 expedition to Japan, Von Siebold was attached to it as medical officer and naturalist. 

 Having arrived there in 1823, he was compelled, like all foreigners, to confine his 

 explorations to the immediate vicinity of Nagasaki, the only port then accessible, but 

 he soon acquired greater freedom in consequence of the repute attached to his name a> 

 a man of science. In 1824 he accompanied the Dutch ambassador to Jeddo (Tokio), but 

 two years later, when on the point of returning to Java, his life was endangered by the 

 excessive zeal of one of his friends who had furnished him with a hitherto unpublished 

 map of the empire, and Von Siebold, who risked his own life to save that of his friend, 

 was thrown into prison. He returned to Europe in 1830, quitted the Dutch service, 

 and employed himself in the arrangement of his rich store of scientific materials which 

 he had collected in Japan. One of the most important works issued by him after his 

 return to Europe was his "Flora Japonica," the first volume of which was published in 

 1835, and the second in 1842. About the year 1850 he established a nursery and 

 " Jardin d'Acclimatation " at Leyden, for the cultivation and distribution of new plants 

 from the Far East, and during the succeeding fifteen years he introduced from China and 

 Japan a large number of plants previously unknown <in European gardens, many of 

 which have proved valuable additions to the Arboretum and Flower Garden. He died 

 at Munich in October, 1866. 



ABIETIA. 



Pseudotsuga, * Carriere, Traite Conif. ed. II. 256 (1867). Bentham and Hooker, Gen. 

 Plant. III. 441 (1881). Masters in Journ. Linn. Soc. XXX. (1893). Tsuga sect. Pseudo- 

 tsuga, Eichler in Engier and Prantl, Jvat. Pfl. Fam. 80 (1887). 



The Douglas Fir does not strictly conform to either of the thm- 

 genera among which the Firs, in a popular sense, are distributed. 

 It differs from all of them in the anatomy of the wood, the 



tracheides of which are 

 spirally marked ; and 

 in the structure of 

 the leaves which have 

 an interrupted, not 

 continuous layer, of 

 hjpodenn cells (see 

 page 33 35) ; the 



Fio- no. Transverse section of leaf of . -U, Mi,, Douglcwi, X 50; leaves agree, llOWeVer, 



with Abies in the 



presence of two lateral resin canals. The staminate flowers of 

 the Douglas Fir have the resemblance of those of Picea but with 

 the anthers spurred as in Abies and Tsuga and differing from the 



* An uncouth, barbarous name, half Greek, half Japanese, "utterly bad in construction" 

 and misleading in such meaning as it has, and which I have refused to adopt as a 

 protest against the admission of such names into scientific nomenclature. Also in com- 

 pliance with Art, 60, sect. 4 of the Laws of Botanical Nomenclature adopted at the 

 International Botanical Congress held at Paris in 1867 which enacts that "Every one 

 is bound to reject a name which is formed by a combination of two languages." 



