A tree, usually 60°—70° tall, with a trunk 2°—3° in diameter, becoming in old age, or when crowded by other trees, branchless below and supporting a narrow open head of short pendulous branches, and branchlets at first light green, slightly viscid, marked by scattered orange-colored oblong lenticels and covered with long pale hairs, dark orange color and glabrous or pubescent during the summer, becoming dull red in their first winter, gradually growing dark orange-brown, lustrous for four or five years and ultimately covered with the white papery bark of older branches. Winter-buds obovoid, acute, about ¼′ long, pubescent below the middle and coated with resinous gum at midsummer, dark chestnut-brown, glabrous and slightly resinous during the winter, their inner scales becoming strap-shaped, rounded at apex, about ½′ long and ⅛′ wide. Bark on young trunks and large limbs thin, creamy white or rarely bronze color or orange-brown and lustrous on the outer surface, bright orange color on the inner, marked by long narrow slightly darker colored raised lenticels, separating into thin papery layers, pale orange color when first exposed to the light, becoming on old trunks for a few feet above the ground sometimes ½′ thick, dull brown or nearly black, sharply and irregularly furrowed and broken on the surface into thick closely appressed scales. Wood light, strong, hard, tough, very close-grained, light brown tinged with red, with thick nearly white sapwood; largely used for spools, shoe-lasts, pegs, and in turnery, the manufacture of wood-pulp, and for fuel. The tough resinous durable bark impervious to water is used by all the northern Indians to cover their canoes and for baskets, bags, drinking-cups, and other small articles, and often to cover their wigwams in winter. Distribution. Rich wooded slopes and the borders of streams, lakes, and swamps scattered through forests of other trees; Labrador to the southern shores of Hudson’s Bay, and southward to Long Island, New York, northern Pennsylvania, central Michigan, northern Wisconsin, northern-central Iowa, eastern Nebraska, North and South Dakota and Wyoming; common in the maritime provinces of Canada and North of the Great Lakes, and in northern New England and New York; small and comparatively rare in the coast region of southern New England and southward; on the highest mountains of New England and northward the var. _minor_ S. Wats and Cov. is common as a small shrub. Often planted in the northeastern states as an ornamental tree. × _Betula Sandbergii_ Britt. and its f. _maxima_ Rosend. generally believed to be natural hybrids of _B. papyrifera_ and _B. pumila_ var. _glandulifera_ Regl. occur in Tamarack swamps in Hennepin County, Minnesota. Passing into the following varieties. Betula papyrifera var. cordifolia Fern. [Illustration: Fig. 200]