GENERAL REVIEW OF CONIFEROUS PLANTS. 19 



several musical instruments, as the violin, piano, &c, for which it is 

 much employed. 



The colour of Coniferous wood varies in the different kinds from 

 a deep reddish brown to white. The Yew, the Californian Red Wood, 

 •and some others, have deep coloured wood, strongly tinged with red; the 

 Virginian Cedar and the Red and Pitch Pines have red wood; Thuia 

 gigantea is commonly known among the settlers in Oregon and British 

 Columbia as the Yellow Cedar, the name having reference to the colour 

 of its wood, and Pinus mitis of the Atlantic States is often called the 

 Yellow Pine for the same reason. The timber of the "Weymouth Pine 

 and that of its nearest allies is white. 



The fragrance of the wood of many Coniferous trees is powerful, and 

 generally of a resinous odour, in many instances it is also agreeable 

 and even useful. Thus the wood of the Red Cedar, used in the manu- 

 facture of pencils, is a familiar example of agreeable ■ fragrance without 

 being too powerful; the wood of the Cembra Pine is much used for 

 wainscotting and the inlaying of wardrobes, on account of its odour being 

 not only agreeable but also obnoxious to insects. The woods of the 

 Deodar Cedar, Yellow Cypress, the American Arbor Vita?, and the 

 Spanish Juniper, are all agreeably fragrant and more or less obnoxious 

 to insects. 



Branches. — The stems or -trunks of Coniferous trees are furnished -with 

 Branches from the base to the summit, which are generally short in 

 proportion to the height of the trunk, and, except in the case of the 

 Cedar of Lebanon, the Yew, and some of the Pines, which have long 

 and spreading branches, they rarely attain a timber-like size. In 

 the Fir and Pine tribe the branches are whorled, that is to say 

 they are produced around the trunk in every direction in tiers, 

 growing either horizontally or slightly inclined upwards till they bend 

 downwards by the weight of their appendages. Each tier or whorl 

 springs from buds protected by membranous scales, which are cast 

 off when the young shoots begin to push into growth; the buds 

 being produced at the point of the stem which terminates the 

 growth of the season previous to that in which the branches first 

 appear, so that the intervals between the whorls show the height the 

 stem has made in successive seasons.* Very often single branches 

 are produced between the whorls, but these may be regarded as 

 adventitious, and they are generally much weaker in their growth 

 than the others. In all the other tribes, the branches are produced 



* Hence, where the whorls are all present from the base to the summit a rough approxi- 

 mation of the age of the tree can he arrived at. 



