CANADIAN SPRUCES. 177 



oi" even in such as are only a few miles distant from the shore, is very- 

 marked. It appears, therefore, to be especially desirable, in recording 

 localities for its occurrence, to note their distance from seaboard or gi-eat 

 lakes. I have already endeavored to impress upon observers the con- 

 sideration that the only reliable material for tracing geographical distri- 

 bution must consist of substantial data, actual local observations care- 

 fully noted and authenticated by specimens, corrected, reduced and com- 

 pared, after the manner of H. C. Watson, and left on record in such 

 form as to render elimination of eri'ors possible, and that mere general 

 impressions received by travellers over the country, although often of 

 great practical value, are not to be regarded as absolute scientific 

 results. * In the early days, when Douglas and Thomas Drummond 

 were solitary wanderers over the Continent, and Menzies was touch- 

 ing the coast at Chebucto and nameless points on the Northern 

 Pacific shores, every scrap of information, and especially their notes 

 on range of species, was of substantial value, but now we have the 

 means of working out problems by more systematic and scientific 

 methods, and of eliminating the errors of individual observation.! 



2. PiCEA NIGRA, Link, in Linnsea xv, p. 520. 



The black spruce is a sombre tree, the old bark of dark color, the 

 surface of young shoots of the year of a dark brown, and clothed with 

 a short sparse fur of thick short curved trichomes. The foliage is of 

 a decidedly dark green colour, but distinctly glaucous or hoary. The 

 leaves are short, almost straight, radiating from the branch in a bottle 

 brush fashion at a nearly uniform angle except that they are 

 turned away from the lower surface of the branch. The leaves 

 (as in other species) vary in size with vigor of tree, but are 

 always much shorter than in the other specie?, and blunt at the apex. 

 The cones, when young, are of a deep purple, or pui'purascent color, 

 becoming reddish-brown as they i-ipen, darkening with age, and ulti- 

 mately changing to a deep dark gray-black when old. The other 

 species drop their cones during the first winter after they are 

 formed; P. nigra retains them for sevei-al years, the recent crop of the 



* See Trans. Royal Soc. of Canada, Vol. II. Sec. i\. p. 16. 



t Abies arctica, Murray, Seeman's Journal, 1867, p. 273, cum ic, is referred by Parlatore as a 

 variety of alba. — DC, Prodromus, XVI., p. 414. On same page there is description of some- 

 thing no doubt quite different, Abies arctica, Cunningh., ex Henk. & Hochst. This is referred to 

 rubra. 



12 



