THE PINE TREE. 157 
lands of Scotland ; it also abounds in a wild state in many 
parts of Norway, Sweden, Russia, Poland, and Germany. It 
is almost invariably in an open or heathy soil that it springs 
naturally ; a grassy vegetation, or a close herbage of any 
kind but heath, is hostile to the growth of the young plant. 
In grass it seldom appears a close crop, even in the vicinity of 
the native forests, where the seeds are thickly dispersed ; 
whereas in moorland, with a short heathy cover, the seeds 
readily come in contact with the ground, and vegetate. The 
stems of the heath are a sufficient protection for the young 
plants, and open enough to prevent them from damping off 
through confinement. In collecting the seeds of Scotch fir, 
it is of great importance that they should be gathered from 
the best native forests, such as those of Abernethy, Duthil, 
Glenmore, and Rothiemurchus on the Spey, or Braemar on 
the Dee, where the trees are found in an indigenous state. 
There exist many varieties of Scotch pine, but these are found 
very rarely in the best native woods; there the foliage and 
figure of the trees are nearly all alike, and their timber of the 
same age is uniformly red, hard, and resinous. But where 
the tree is removed from its native habitat, and repeatedly 
propagated in a different soil and climate, it runs into a 
number of varieties of foliage and form, and after a few 
generations in cultivation it becomes degenerate, short-lived, 
and its timber is comparatively worthless. 
The first published account we have of the varieties of 
Scotch pine is in a Treatise on Forest Trees, by the Earl of 
Haddington, published in 1760. His Lordship’says, “ When 
I cut firs that were too near the house, there were people 
alive here who remembered when my father bought the seed. 
It was all sown together in the seed-bed, removed to a nur- 
sery, and afterwards planted out the same day. These trees 
I cut down, and saw some of them very white and spongy, 
others of them red and hard, though standing within a few 
yards of one another. This makes me gather my cones from 
the trees that bear the reddest wood, as I said before.” 
Boutcher, in 1775, says, “It has been an old dispute whether 
