PINE. 



285 



heavy, hard, resinous, and of excellent quality for sleepers, paving- 

 blocks, masts, beams and planks ; whilst from farther north, as 

 from Gefle and Soderhamn in central Sweden, a wood of high 

 quality is shipped, and from the White Sea a closer-grown, less 

 resinous kind more suitable for joinery. 



The sapwood is yellowish to reddish-white, the heart only 

 becoming distinct as a brownish-red in drying, and the wood 



FIG. 57. Transverse section of Northern Pine (Pinus sylvestris). 



being on the whole whiter when grown on plains, redder when 

 on hills. The annual rings are very distinct, owing to the 

 broad sharply-defined zone of dark autumn wood that charac- 

 terizes the "hard-pines," and they are slightly wavy. The 

 resin-ducts are numerous, very large and distinct and mostly 

 in peripheral zones near the outer margin of the rings 

 (Fig. 57). The pith-rays consist of two or three rows of thin- 

 walled parenchyma with large oval pits on their radial walls, 

 each almost as wide as a tracheid, and two or three rows of 



