104 FAMILIAR TREES 
in France and Germany. This has been owing in 
great measure to its rapid growth during early 
youth and its supposed immunity from insect and 
fungoid attacks. 
Probably the most interesting specimen of the 
Douglas Fir in England is that in the celebrated 
pinetum at Dropmore, close to Burnham Beeches, 
Buckinghamshire. It was raised from some of the 
first seed brought home by Douglas, in December, 
1827. It bore its first cone in 1835, when only 
eight years old, and in 1837 it was nineteen feet high. 
In 1871, ~e. at forty-four years of age, it was 100 feet 
high and nine feet seven inches in girth at three feet 
from the ground, and in 1897 it was 108 feet high, 
giving an average growth in height of twenty-five and 
a half inches a year for fifty-one years, a rate probably 
unprecedented in this country. Such specimens, in 
favourable soil and with full room to develop, are 
believed to have laid on a mean annual increment 
of wood of as much as three cubic feet, as against one 
cubic foot as. the most that could be anticipated from 
a Larch. It is an interesting fact that the finest 
specimens. in Scotland are growing close to the 
birthplace of Menzies, the discoverer, and Douglas, 
the introducer of the species, viz. at Castle Menzies, 
Murthly Castle, Scone, and Taymount, all in Perthshire. 
TRANSVERSE SECTION OF NEEDLE LEAF OF DOUGLAS FIR. 
