78 ABIES, OR SILVER FIRS 
been more appropriately likened in number to twins 
than triplets, and whether consensus of opinion will 
some day reduce them to a dual state, is in anticipa- 
tion of the results of our remarks on the subject. 
We will only generally add that if twins are hard to 
know apart, a@ fortiori triplets cannot be expected to 
do anything but treble difficulties. 
The first point that we would impress is that they 
are trees of uncommon appearance with us. They 
are not the sort of plants that you are in the least 
likely to stumble across in an everyday walk, or even 
after Sabbath-day journeyings, or to alight upon in a 
full-grown glory of adolescence, or in their fuller 
maturity of a cone-clad age. But since they are 
Conifers that grow in England they come into our 
story, and must not be omitted from the programme 
of our curriculum. 
A. Firma.—The Common Fir of S. Japan was once 
—notwithstanding the fact that it was a name 
equally applicable to several others—appositely called 
A. Bifida, on account of the two very evident little 
sharp points that surmount the apex of the leaf (vide 
illustration, Abies Introductory, p. 68). It occupies 
in its own country regions the same sort of position 
that the A. Pectinata occupies here, and that is, as 
its English name implies, the Common Silver Fir of 
the district. 
It is in that guise, and armed with credentials as 
an endemic or Common Fir of another country, that 
the A. Firma and all that pertains to it should be 
enshrined in our memory 1eady for recall if occasion 
offers. 
From our Common Fir it can be easily dissociated. 
While the Japanese has these sharp points at apex 
of leaf—and which we rightly or wrongly are desig- 
nating bifid, in contradistinction to the more un- 
