6oi] ENGELMANN—A SYNOPSIS OF THE AMERICAN FIRS. 1 
protruding, acute or cuspidate; scales one-third wider than they are high; 
seed-wings longer than wide; cotyledons 5.—A. hirtella {Pimis, H.B.K. 
ib. is scarcely a variety. 
7. A. BRACTEATA {Pinus Don in Trans. Lin. Soc. 17, 443, 1837; Pari. 
1 . c. 419) Nutt. Sylv. 3, 137, 1849, P. venusta Dough Bot. Mag. Comp, 2, 
152, 1836.—A well marked, but little known tree, of very limited geogra¬ 
phical distribution, being confined, as far as known, to the Santa Lucia 
Mountains in Southern California, though other localities in different 
parts of California are attributed to it by seed dealers, and having been 
gathered only by very few collectors. — Leaves linear-lanceolate, always 
acute, of very firm texture. The bract is scarcely longer than the some¬ 
what rounded, glabrous (all the other firs have pubescent ones) scale, 
but its awn or midrib* protrudes i-i£ inches; wing of seed rounded. 
8. A. nobilis {Pinus Dougl. Comp, Bot. Mag. 2, 147, 1836; Pari. l, c. 
419) Lindl. Penn. Cyc. 1, No. 5. Pseudotsuga nobilis Bertrand, McNab, 
under Pinus : the red fir of the Cascades in Oregon, extending southward 
to the Shasta region of California; stately trees, 200 feet high, with rigid, 
glaucous foliage; thick, rough, cinnamon-brown bark, and useful timber. 
A section in the Oregon collection of the Centennial Exhibition was taken 
from a tree 2& feet in diameter, bark 1 inch thick, 119 annual rings of 
nearly even thickness throughout. The leaves of young trees and of the 
lower sterile branches of old trees are longer, flat and grooved, the resin 
ducts lateral* and the fibro-vascular bundles more or less divided in two ; 
those of the fully developed and especially the fertile branches are shorter, 
flat-quadrangular, their thickness not more than £ or rarely § of the 
width ;* bundles single, cylindrical. Bracts more or less protruding and 
reflexed; scale high in proportion to its width (71/10); the oblique, angu¬ 
lar wing of the seed about as wide as long and as long as the slender seed; 
the only good seed I could examine had 7 cotyledons. 
9. A. magnifica Murray Prov. Hort. Soc. 3, 318, 1863; A. nobilis var. 
robusta ill Hort. Dickson «& Turnbull; A.ca7npylocarpa Murr. Trans. Bot. 
Soc. 6, 370; A. amabilis of the Californian botanists; Pseudotsuga mag- 
nifica McNab : the red fir of the higher California sierras, at an altitude of 
7-10,000 feet; large trees often 10 feet in diameter, over 200 feet high, with 
thick cinnamon-brown bark, and valuable wood.f Leaves of young spe¬ 
cimens flat but scarcely grooved, never, I believe, notched, the fibrous 
bundles, often in twos. On full-grown trees, and especially on fertile 
branches, the leaves are mostly 4 wider than thick, or even perfectly 
square; the resin ducts in these leaves are placed equidistant from the 
edges and the keel, separated from the epidermis by a layer of hypoderm 
* The leaf sections, figured by McNab, all seem to refer to young- trees; none are as 
thick as I find them in nativejspecimens. 
f A section in the Agricultural Dep. of Cent. Exh., sent by J. G. Lemmon, indicates a 
tree 6£ feet in diameter, with brown, almost fibrous, bark, 3 inches thick, about 400 years 
old, with a pretty uniform growth, 10 rings measuring 1-2 inches in thickness, about the 
same as in a specimen of nobilis in the Oregon ^collection. 
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