A SYSTEMATIC STUDY 



OF THE 



SPECIES WHOSE WOODS ABE REPKESENTED IN THE ACCOM- 

 PANYING SECTIONS. 



The timbers comprised in the series, which this text is designed to 

 accompany, belong to what are known, botanically speaking, as Flower- 

 ing and Exogenous Plants. At the outset, therefore, we will, once for 

 all, define these groups; and, as the characters herein given are equally 

 true of all the species enumerated in the following pages, they need not 

 be repeated in the further definition of the various sub-groups and 

 species. 



FLOWERING OR PH^NOGAMOUS PLANTS. 



Vegetables producing flowers which consist essentially of stamens and 

 pistils, the latter bearing ovules or seeds. 



In distinction from the Flowering Plants are the Flowerless or Gryptogamous 

 Plants, comprising the rest of the vegetable kingdom, from the very simply organ- 

 ized Slime Moulds and Bacteria up to the highly organized Ferns and Club-Mosses. 

 But in the study of timbers this group is unimportant, as only in a few rare cases do 

 any of its representatives attain the dimensions of trees. Those exceptions are the 

 Tree-Ferns of tropical countries gigantic ferns, which sometimes attain the height 

 of fifty or sixty feet, with straight shafts quite like tree trunks and tops consisting 

 of a bunch of enormous plume-like fronds. They, however, are of practically no 

 value as timber. 



EXOGENOUS OR DICOTYLEDONOUS PLANTS. 



Flowering plants whose stems consist of a central column of pith sur- 

 rounded by wood in concentric layers, and this in turn by bark; the 

 stems increasing in thickness by the addition of a new layer each year to 

 the wood externally and to the bark internally. Leaves mostly netted- 

 veined. First leaves of the embryo (cotyledons) two and opposite, or (in 

 the Coniferae) several in a whorl. Parts of the flower in fours or fives, 

 very rarely in threes. 



A second class of Flowering Plants and comprising the rest of the group is the 

 Endogenous or Monocotyledonous Plants, characterized by having stems in which the 



