P. PONDEROSA, JEFFREYI, TUBERCULATA 39 
this group. Whether it is that they have endured 
the conditions of our climate with more success than 
other trees imported about the:same time, or whether 
their presence is due to the fact that those who 
planted them, when they preferred an off-hand 
request, perhaps on some visit to a nursery garden, 
and asked in all their innocence for a rarer Pine to 
plant somewhere or other, on some newly enclosed 
garden or ground, mead, or meadow, were, so to speak, 
served across the counter with the readiest-at-hand 
stock-in-trade article of the nurserymen, which often 
turned out to be the subject of our discourse, the 
P. Ponderosa (and which often, by the way, was 
distributed under the name of P, Benthamii), I am 
unable to do more than surmise. Those that it has 
been my fate to see have all exhibited the curious 
phase of curved and tortuous branches. 
The different colour of the shoots (vide Table), and 
the larger cones, seem to be the best points to make 
for, to decide between the Ponderosa and Jeffreyi. 
Both seem to depend for success upon a dry soil, and 
to prefer a dry climate. 
P. TUBERCULATA and the two-leaved P. Muricata 
have one point in common, and that is to be noticed 
in their cone-clusters clinging persistently on the 
large-sized branches. As the P. Tuberculata is a 
three-leaf-in-a-cluster Pine and the P.. Muricata a 
two-leaf-in-a-cluster Pine, the problem of distinguish- 
ing the one from the other is most happily reduced 
to aneasy process. In the case of the P..Tuberculata 
these cone-clusters appear in the very early stages of. 
life in the tree. Not content with crowding them- 
selves on the older branches, they also invade the 
main trunk of the tree, until at times they actually 
become embedded in it. For this reason the tree 
appropriately receives its name Tuberculata, a word 
