THE SPRUCE FIR 109 



hue ; but it is not generally until the drying wind and 

 warm sun of the following spring that they discharge 

 their seeds. These are furnished with oval, semi- 

 transparent, pale brown wings. 



The Spruce grows almost as rapidly from seed as 

 does the Scotch Pine ; for, though for three or four 

 years not exceeding six or eight inches per annum, 

 after reaching a height of three feet the plants will 

 grow from two to three feet a year until they are 

 fifty feet high, so that they may be as much as 

 fifteen feet at ten years old, whilst they may attain 

 in fifty years to a height of a hundred feet. In its 

 native country the tree is not thought to live much 

 beyond a hundred or a hundred and fifty years, 

 and the best Spruce timber brought into the market 

 is from seventy to ninety years old. 



The species is widely distributed both in latitude 

 and longitude more so, in fact, than many of its 

 allies, being indigenous alike in the Kurile Islands 

 and Siberia, and from the Swiss Alps to beyond 

 the Arctic Circle. Though in its extreme northern 

 area it seldom occurs at an altitude of more than 

 750 feet above sea-level, in the south of Norway 

 it reaches more than 3,000 feet, at the same time 

 descending the shores of some of the fjords down to 

 the water's edge. It is, in fact, the prevalent tree of 

 the basin of the Baltic, and Loudon states that the 

 finest Spruce forests which he had seen were between 

 Memel and Konigsberg, growing in peaty soil that rested 

 on sand, and was liable to inundation during a great 

 part of every winter. It is, in fact, owing to its require- 

 ment, for its successful cultivation as a timber tree, of 



