HABITS OF LARCH 137 
they plant, and so act in an obedience to a golden 
rule. 
The Larch is by nature a cold-country tree. From 
green forests in northern lands it hails. 
In its characteristics it is a plagiarist of deepest 
dye. In the more essential part of those charac- 
teristics it shows no originality, unless it be that the 
Larch is the basement type, and that these others 
undermentioned as prototypes should offer submission 
to him, not he to them. 
In its two kinds of branches, long and arrested, in 
the crowded fascicles: of its leaves, produced on spurs, 
tufts, or short-arrested branches, in the position of 
its resin canals and undivided fibrovascular bundle 
of its leaf structure, it resembles the Cedars, and very 
properly joins their family circle under the family 
name Laricee. 
So far right, but when it produces cones with 
persistent scales like the Picea, which are at the same 
time of upright position, as are the Abies, and when 
its flowers are as the Tsugas, the charge of non- 
originality cannot be said to have been sounded in 
vain. If it lays claim to any individuality among 
these evergreen trees that it has taken its various 
cues of character from, it is that, unlike any of them, 
it holds to deciduous ideas and habits, and they do 
not. Perhaps it is because it hails from northern lands, 
with their winters of daylightless days and prolonged 
nights, that it feels, like many northern men and beasts, 
a natural inclination to take to hibernating ways, 
and preparatory to that, to follow the custom of 
civilization accredited to the former, of taking off 
its clothes before the operation. At the earliest sign 
of spring it is the first of trees to hurry them on again 
and set a good example of early rising. 
L. Lepro.epis (JAPANESE LarcH).—The Common 
