A SYSTEMATIC STUDY. 



OF THE 



SPECIES WHOSE WOODS AKE REPRESENTED 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 

 Flowering and mostly Exogenous Plants. At the outset, therefore, 

 we will, once for all, deiine these groups; and, as the characters 

 herein given are equally true of all the species enumerated in the fol- 

 lowing pages, they need not be repeated in the further definition of 

 the various sub-groups and species. 



FLOWERING OK PILENOGAMOUS PLANTS. 



Plants 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 Cryptogamous 

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

 organized 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 some- 

 times 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 

 surrounded 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-vein. First leaves of the embryo (cotyledons) two and 

 opposite, or (in the Coniferge) several in a whorl. Parts of the flower 

 in fours or fives, very rarelv in threes. 



