Resinous trees, with bark often separating into long shred-like scales, fragrant durable usually light brown heartwood, pale yellow sapwood, stout erect branches often becoming horizontal in old age, slender 4-angled branchlets, and naked buds. Leaves scale-like, ovate, acute, acuminate, or bluntly pointed at apex, with slender spreading or appressed tips, thickened, rounded, and often glandular on the back, opposite in pairs, becoming brown and woody before falling; on vigorous leading shoots and young plants needle-shaped or linear-lanceolate and spreading. Flowers minute, monœcious, terminal, yellow, the two sexes on separate branchlets; the male oblong, of numerous decussate stamens, with short filaments enlarged into broadly ovate connectives bearing 2—6 globose pendulous anther-cells; female oblong or subglobose, composed of 6—10 thick decussate scales bearing in several rows at the base of the ovuliferous scale numerous erect bottle-shaped ovules. Fruit an erect nearly globose cone maturing in the second year, composed of the much thickened ovule-bearing scales of the flower, abruptly dilated, clavate and flattened at the apex, bearing the remnants of the flower-scales developed into a short central more or less thickened mucro or boss; long-persistent on the branch after the escape of the seeds. Seeds numerous, in several rows, erect, thick, and acutely angled or compressed, with thin lateral wings; seed-coat of 2 layers, the outer thin and membranaceous, the inner thicker and crustaceous; cotyledons 3 or 4, longer than the superior radicle. Cupressus with ten or twelve species is confined to Pacific North America and Mexico in the New World and to southeastern Europe, southwestern Asia, the Himalayas, and China in the Old World. Of the exotic species _Cupressus sempervirens_ L., of southeastern Europe and southwestern Asia, and especially its pyramidal variety, are often planted for ornament in the south Atlantic and Pacific states. _Cupressus_ is the classical name of the Cypress-tree. CONSPECTUS OF THE NORTH AMERICAN SPECIES