90 ABIES, OR SILVER FIRS 
winters of 1915-16 and 1916-17, and after several 
quite brisk struggles for existence, has now achieved 
the not very giddy height of twelve inches, but other- 
wise the presentation of an appearance that you may 
describe as robust. Yet there is a memento mori 
atmosphere that clings to the story of the tree. Like 
shadows they come into the story of our trees here, 
and like shadows time after time have they dis- 
appeared. The likes and unlikes are called attention 
to in the Table, and the fact noted that the Sacha- 
linensis has some seven or eight stomatiferous bands, 
the A. Sibirica only four or five. 
A. Mariesi.—The Alpine Fir of Central Japan 
was discovered in 1878 by C. Maries, and is regarded 
as rare. It is accounted among the more hopeless 
of those plants upon which persuasion has been 
brought to bear to do their best under the circum- 
stances of a strange land, and possibly in some cases 
of a strange altitude. There are, we think, one or 
two more that have not met the eye of the authorities, 
and that have done better than they are generally 
given credit for. The dark-looking branchlets are 
covered over with the rustiest of dark-looking choco- 
late-coloured pubescence that ever covered twig of 
tree, matted and tangled, and with as tell-tale a 
surface as the goat-skin which deceived the patriarch 
Isaac. If more tokens were called for to complete 
its identity, we should compare its outward appear- 
ance to a short-leaved Nordmanniana, so short that 
it has the resembling look of a Hemlock Spruce. Yet 
a Nordmanniana, with its shiny, grey-brown, smooth- 
looking twigs and its only scattered pubescence, has 
little in real common with the dark, hirsute-twigged 
Mariesii. Nor, for the matter of that, has the Mariesii 
much in common with the smoother, less pubescent, 
twigged Veitchii, 
