P. RIGIDA 43 
to pronounce upon authoritatively, but we do claim 
that of the half-dozen hard-wood Pines that hail 
from the same district in which the scene of the Song 
of Hiawatha is laid, on the southern shore of Lake 
Superior, no tree among them could with more 
faithfulness depict the blackness and gloom described 
there than the Pinus Rigida. 
If the P.. Patula is to be regarded as rightly 
entitled to the award in a beauty competition, the 
P, Rigida can put forward a very substantial claim 
to a first prize in a class of precisely opposite 
conditions. When the P. Rigida is set beside the 
other members of the Abietinee, their few deformities 
here and there shrink into insignificance by the side 
of its deformities. In a similar-conditioned show, 
Quasimodo, the hideous dwarf (in Victor Hugo’s 
Notre Dame), had only to put his head in the horse 
collar for the briefest of moments to overmaster any 
opposition that could be brought to bear against 
him. The P. Rigida at Kew has only to be looked 
at for a few moments to convince any beholder of its 
ability to make as easy a conquest over any rival in 
a similar competition. ‘With its scarcity of twisted 
leaves, its scrubby appearance, the unnatural look of 
its adventitious branches—and sometimes even sta- 
minate flowers poking their way out from the main 
trunk—it gives an onlooker the idea that an unkind 
Nature has doubled it up with every crippling com- 
plexity, and pelted it with every disability that 
plant life or human life could be heir to. 
As a profitable institution it ranks high in its own 
country, and produces resin in quantities. It is called 
the northern, while Palustris and Ponderosa are. 
called respectively the southern and western Pitch 
Pines. 
