Trees or rarely shrubs, with deeply furrowed and sometimes laminate or with thin and scaly bark, hard or often soft heartwood often conspicuously marked by dark bands of summer cells impregnated with resin, pale nearly white sapwood, and large branch-buds formed during summer and composed of minute buds in the axils of bud-scales, becoming the bracts of the spring shoot. Leaves needle-shaped, clustered, the clusters borne on deciduous spurs in the axils of scale-like primary leaves, inclosed in the bud by numerous scales lengthening and forming a more or less persistent sheath at the base of each cluster. Male flowers clustered at the base of leafy growing shoots of the year, each flower surrounded at the base by an involucre of 3—6 scale-like bracts, composed of numerous sessile anthers, imbricated in many ranks and surmounted by crest-like nearly orbicular connectives; the female subterminal or lateral, their scales in the axils of non-accrescent bracts. Fruit a woody cone maturing at the end of the second or rarely of the third season, composed of the hardened and woody scales of the flower more or less thickened on the exposed surface (the _apophysis_), with the ends of the growth of the previous year appearing as terminal or dorsal brown protuberances or scars (the _umbo_). Seeds usually obovoid, shorter or longer than their wings or rarely wingless; outer seed-coat crustaceous or thick, hard, and bony, the inner membranaceous; cotyledons 3—18, usually much shorter than the inferior radicle. Pinus is widely distributed through the northern hemisphere from the Arctic Circle to the West Indies, the mountains of Central America, the Canary Islands, northern Africa, the Philippine Islands, and Sumatra. About sixty-six species are recognized. Of exotic species the so-called Scotch Pine, _Pinus sylvestris_ L., of Europe and Asia, the Swiss Stone Pine, _Pinus cembra_ L., and the Austrian Pine and other forms of _Pinus nigra_ Arnold, from central and southern Europe, are often planted in the northeastern states, and _Pinus Pinaster_ Ait., of the coast region of western France and the Mediterranean Basin is successfully cultivated in central and southern California. _Pinus_ is the classical name of the Pine-tree. The North American species can be conveniently grouped in two sections, Soft Pines and Pitch Pines. SOFT PINES. Wood soft, close-grained, light-colored, the sapwood thin and nearly white; sheaths of the leaf-clusters deciduous; leaves with one fibro-vascular bundle.