The Cedar. * 



" exposures. The White Cedar is seventy or eighty feet 

 " high, and rarely more than three feet in diameter, unless 

 " perhaps in the great swamps which have not been tho- 



roughly explored, such as the Dismal Swamp near Nor- 

 ^' folk, in Virginia, which is covered with this species and 

 " the Cypress. When the White Cedars are close and 

 " compressed, the trunk is straight, perpendicular, and 

 " destitute of branches to the height of fifty or sixty feet : 

 " they are observed to choose the centre of the swamps, 

 " and the Cypresses the circumference. The epidermis is 



very thin on the young stocks but, as they grow older, 

 " it becomes thick, of a soft filaceous texture, of a reddish 

 " colour, and similar to that of an old Vine. When cut, a 

 " yellow transparent resin, of an agreeable odour, exudes, 



of which a few ounces could hardly be collected in a 

 " summer from a tree of three feet in circumference. The 

 " foliage is evergreen ; each leaf is a little branch, nume- 

 " rously subdivided, and composed of small, acute, imbri- 



cated scales, on the back of which a minute gland is dis- 



cerned with the lens. In the angle of these ramifications 



grow the flowers, ^vhich are scarcely visible, and which 

 " produce very small rugged cones of a greenish tint, which 

 " changes to bluish towards the fall, w^hen they open to 

 " release the fine seeds. The concentrical circles are 

 " always perfectly distinct, even in stocks of considerable 



size, but their number and compactness prove that the 

 " tree arrives at its full growth only after a long lapse of 

 " years. I have counted 277 annual layers in a trunk 

 " twenty-one inches in diameter, and five feet from the 

 " ground, and forty-seven in a plant only eight inches thick 



at the surface, which proved it to be already fifty years 

 " old. I was told that the swamp in which it grew had 

 " been burnt at least half a century before, and had been 

 " repeopled from a few stocks that escaped the conflagra- 



