The most widely known commercial product manufactured from this tree is Canada balsam. Strictly speaking, it is not a manufactured article except what is done in nature’s laboratory, and the product is the resin stored under bark blisters. The resin is transparent, and is employed by microscopists in mounting objects for examination. Little machinery or apparatus is used in removing the viscid fluid from the pockets in the bark. With a knife the thin, soft blister is slit and the resin is scraped out. All kinds of claims of medicinal virtue are made for balsam resin in the region where the tree grows; but the treatment in most cases effects cures--if any cures are really effected--by appeals to faith and the imagination. Balsam fir owes a large part of its importance to its abundance. It is not exactly a swamp tree, but it does best in damp situations where the ground is moist and cool in summer. Only in periods of protracted drought does the ground litter become sufficiently dry to burn fiercely, and to that fact is due much of the promise of future supply of balsam fir. That which grows on the dry uplands may fall prey to forest fires, but that in the damp flats, associated with northern white cedar and tamarack, will hold its ground and continue to supply demand. Balsam fir has an importance which can not be wholly measured in feet, pounds, cords, or dollars. Many of the choicest Christmas trees which in December go by tens of thousands to the cities, are of this tree. Its form is almost perfect, being conical, broad near the bottom, and running to a sharp apex. The deep green of the needles, which retain their color from two weeks to a month after the trunk is severed, gives balsam Christmas trees much of their popularity. The trees are cut from Maine to Michigan, and many are shipped across the international boundary from Canada. The custom of cutting Christmas trees is often condemned as a waste of resources. It has been argued that the destruction in one month of 1,000,000 young trees is equivalent to the destruction of 500,000,000 feet of lumber, because, if allowed to reach maturity, they would yield that much lumber. That argument does not take into consideration the fact that not one of the young trees in ten would reach maturity if left to the course of nature. When Gifford Pinchot was United States forester, a protest against the cutting of Christmas trees was formally laid before him. It was generally believed that he would declare that the waste ought to be stopped and would set his disapproval on the practice; but he did nothing of the sort. He declared that the forests are for the use of the people and that they can serve in no better way than by supplying every child in the land with a Christmas tree once a year. [Illustration] FRASER FIR [Illustration: FRASER FIR] FRASER FIR (_Abies Fraseri_)