308 
VARIETY OF TREES IN AMERICA. 
European and American Trees compared . 
Tlie woods of North America are strikingly distinguished 
from those of Europe by the vastly greater variety of species 
they contain. According to Clave, there are in u France and 
in most parts of Europe 55 only about twenty forest trees, five 
or six of which are spike leaved and resinous, the remainder 
broad-leaved.” * Our author, however, doubtless means gen¬ 
era, though he uses the word especes. Rossmassler enumerates 
fifty-seven species of forest trees as found in Germany, but 
some of these are mere shrubs, some are fruit and properly 
garden trees, and some others are only varieties of familiar 
species. The valuable manual of Parade describes about the 
same number, including, however, two of American origin— 
the locust, Robinia pseudacacia, and the Weymouth or white 
pine, Pinus strobus —and the cedar of Lebanon from Asia, 
though it is indigenous in Algeria also. We may then safely 
say that Europe does not possess above forty or fifty trees of 
such economical value as to be worth the special care of the 
forester, while the oak alone numbers not less than thirty 
species in the United States,f and some other North American 
genera are almost equally diversified.^; 
* Etudes Forestieres , p. 7. 
t For very full catalogues of American forest trees, and remarks on 
their geographical distribution, consult papers on the subject by Dr. J. G. 
Cooper, in the Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1858, and the 
Report of the United States Patent Office, Agricultural Division, for 1860. 
t Although Spenser’s catalogue of trees occurs in the first canto of the 
first book of the “ Faery Queene ’’—the only canto of that exquisite poem 
actually read by most students of English literature—it is not so generally 
familiar as to make the quotation of it altogether superfluous : 
VII. 
Enforst to Beeke some covert nigh at hand, 
A shadie grove not farr away they epide, 
That promist ayde the tempest to withstand ; 
Whose loftie trees, yclad with sommers pride, 
Did spred so broad, that heavens light did hide, 
Not perceable with power of any starr : 
And all within were pathes and alleies wide, 
With footing worne, and leading inward farr ; 
Faire harbour that them seems ; so in they entred ar. 
