PINETUM DANICUM. 



273 



the leaves, when bruised and mixed with hogs-lard, are efficacious for 

 the removal of rheumatism. 



In America the full-grown Arborvit^e is easily distinguished from 

 all other trees by its shape and foliage. The trunk tapers rapidly 

 from a very large base to a very slender summit, and is furnished 

 with branches for four-fifths of its height. The principal limbs are 

 widely distant from each other, placed at right angles with the trunk, 

 and have a great number of drooping secondary branches. The bark 

 upon the trunk is slightly furrowed, but smooth to the touch, and very 

 white when the tree stands exposed. The wood is reddish, somewhat 

 odorous, very light and soft, and very fine-grained. A cool soil 

 seems to be indispensable to its growth. It is never seen on the up- 

 lands among the Beeches, the Birches, &c. , but is found on the rocky 

 edges of the innumerable rivulets and small lakes which are scattered 

 over those countries; and it occupies in great part, or exclusively, 

 swamps from fifty acres to a hundred acres in extent, some of which 

 are accessible only in the winter, when they are frozen over and covered 

 with several feet of snow. It abounds exactly in proportion to the 

 degree of humidity which exists in the soil, and in the driest marshes 

 it is mingled with the Black Spruce, the Hemlock Spruce, the Yellow 

 Birch, the Black Ash, and a few specimens of the White Pine. In all of 

 these marshes the surface is covered with a bed of Sphagnum, so 

 thick and so surcharged with moisture that the foot sinks half-leg 

 deep into it, while the water rises under the pressure. On the border 

 of the lakes, where the Arborvitse has room, and enjoys the benefit of 

 the light and air, it rises perpendicularly, grows more rapidly, and 

 attains a greater size than when crowded in the swamps, where 

 its thick foliage intercepts the light from the trunk and impedes the 

 circulation of the air. In the swamps its trunk is rarely straight, but 

 forms an elliptic curve, more or less inclined to the ground (iVlichx.). 



By a strange mistake of Linnseus, this species is handed down as 

 a native of Siberia, because Gmelin (Fl. Sib. 182) mentions a 

 Thuya, to which he misapplies the synonyms of the present, but 

 wliich, by his own account, is different ; for he says it is paler than 

 the garden kind, and smaller in all its parts. It was brought to him 

 by a travelling surgeon, from rocks near Pekin, in China, and could 

 be no other than Biota orientalis (Smith in Rees's Cyc). The American 

 Arborvitfe appears to have been first introduced into Europe in the 

 time of Francis I. , at the beginning of the sixteenth century ; Clusius 

 having stated that the first tree that he saw of it was one in the Boyal 

 Garden at Fontainebleau, which had been sent from Canada as a 

 present to that monarch. 



From the shape of the main stem, Michaux observes, it is difiicult 

 to procure trunks of any considerable length with a uniform diameter ; 

 hence in the district of Maine the timber of this tree is little em- 

 ployed for the framework of houses, though in other respects it is 



T 



