PINUS ELLIOTTII. 377 
Part oF PLATE III. ot) 
flowers. Our species bears abundantly every year (at least in South Carolina), different from P. aus- 
tralis, which, like many other pines, is fruitful only every other season. The cones also mature and 
drop off earlier than those of the associated pines, and shed an abundance of seeds, which readily 
germinate about November, and develop their young stems in spring. 
his tree Prof. Sargent considers by far the handsomest of all the southern pines, readily distin- 
guished i those with which it is associated, by its heavier, denser heads, darker foliage, and 
larger and heavier branches. 
The red-brown bark is very characteristic of this species ; it is regularly laminated, and [188] 
the outer laminz exfoliate in rather rigid and brittle, often very thin, plates of a purplish color 
when fresh, whence the local name of Blue Pine ; the bark of P. australis is somewhat similar, but 
the plates are much larger. 
1e timber is excellent, heavy, very tough, and more resinous even than that of P. australis, 
which it resembles ; of a striped yellowish-brown and paler resin color (the inner portion of each 
ring, formed earlier in the season, being paler; the outer part, of later growth, brown); fibre coarser 
than in australis and more tenacious. It grows rapidly, at least in its youth: a tree of 22 inches 
diameter, and about 140 years old, had in the semi-diameter 8h inches of heartwood with 74 annual 
rings, and white sapwood 24 inches thick with 60 to 70 rings; another of over 3 feet diameter, 109 
feet high, and 200 years old, had a radius of 17 inches heartwood with about 140 rings, and 3 inches 
of sapwood of 60 rings. Thus the average rings of the heartwood were over 1} lines and those of 
the sapwood (because of later growth) about } line wide. The leaves of tyoung trees are more fre- 
quently in twos, in older ones as often in threes ; those of trees from swampy soil are apt to be 
shorter than others ; the structure in all of them is the same. 
