A LABRADOR SPRING 
slow. The other tree was on the edge of the 
forest close to a marsh, where conditions for 
growth were so favourable that it had attained 
a diameter of fifty-eight inches in ninety-nine 
years. 
A white spruce stump close to the house at 
Mingan with a circumference of seventy inches 
two feet from the ground had lived 132 years; 
there were thirty-seven rings in the last inch. 
Another, a veteran, that had been cut down 
twenty inches from the ground on Mingan 
Island and left where it fell, had been fifty-five 
feet tall. Its stump sixty-five inches in circum- 
ference and eighteen inches in diameter was 
sound to the very centre, and showed 226 rings, 
Between its 5oth and 180th years it had grown 
with uniform rapidity, as the rings were broad, 
but after that its growth was slow, and in the 
last three-fourths inch of its circumference it 
showed forty-six rings. If we suppose the tree 
had been cut down within a year, it must have 
begun life in the year 1683, or only three years 
after the founding of the Hudson’s Bay Com- 
pany. 
The distinction between the three different 
species of spruces is at times confusing. The 
216 
