214 WOODY PLANTS OF MASSACHUSETTS. 
space below the branches. The branches are numerous and 
small, of a very dark purple, looking black at a distance, in con- 
trast with the white trunk, and conspicuously spotted with oval, 
horizontal, gray dots. The recent shoots are brown, closely dot- 
ted with round dots, and, in the next year, often scattered with 
white scales. The leaves are on long slender footstalks, tuian- 
gular or heater-shaped, rounded or right-angled, or heart-shaped 
at base, ending in a long tapering point, irregularly toothed, the 
larger teeth having an abrupt sharp point, shining on both sur- 
faces, and glutinous when young. In autumn, they fade to a 
rich yellow. 
The male flowers are on cylindrical, brownish-yellow, pendu- 
lous catkins, usually single at the end of the branches, three 
inches long. The larger scale is shield-like, the next two rounded, 
the mner three inversely egg-shaped, all fringed; the former three 
brown, the latter yellowish. The fertile flowers are in smaller 
and more slender, erect, lateral catkins, with green scales. ‘The 
stigmas are shorter than m the other species, and the catkins 
thence look smoother. When mature, the ament becomes a cyl- 
indrical strobile, an inch or more long, and two or three eighths 
thick, on a footstalk three eighths of an inch long. 
The white birch is valuable for the rapidity with which it 
srows on any kind of soil, or even without soul. It makes a 
pleasant border for the road,—infinitely better than none. IJ have 
found myself sensibly relieved, in a walk ona sunny afternoon, 
by the thin shade of low dwarf birches, which had sprung up 
by the road side. In twelve or fourteen years, it grows to its 
usual height of twenty or twenty-five feet, and in this way bet- 
ter than in any other, can a profit be derived from otherwise 
useless land. It makes tolerable fuel, less valuable doubtless 
than the wood of most other deciduous trees, and ranking with 
that of the evergreens, but answering well, for the common 
purposes of the kitchen, for more than half the year. But it 
grows on poor land, where scarcely any thing else will, and on 
good land in a shorter time than any other tree, as on good land 
it may be advantageously cut every ten years. It makes a 
valuable coal for smiths. 
All the birch trees, especially the black and the white, are so 
