Leaves dark green and lustrous on the upper surface, silvery white on the lower surface, with bands of 4—8 rows of stomata, ½′ long on cone-bearing branches to 1¼′ long on the sterile branches of young trees, straight, acute or acuminate, with short or elongated rigid callous tips, spreading at nearly right angles to the branch on young trees and sterile branches, on the upper branches of older trees often broadest above the middle, rounded or obtusely short-pointed at apex, occasionally emarginate on branches at the top of the tree. Flowers: male yellow, more or less deeply tinged with reddish purple; female with nearly orbicular purple scales much shorter than their oblong-obovate serrulate pale yellow-green bracts emarginate with a broad apex abruptly contracted into a long slender recurved tip. Fruit oblong-cylindric, gradually narrowed to the rounded apex, puberulous, dark rich purple, 2′—4′ long, with scales usually longer than broad, generally almost twice as long; rarely not as long as their bracts, (var. _phanerolepis_ Fern.); seeds about ¼′ long and rather shorter than their light brown wings. A tree, 50°—60° high, with a trunk usually 12′—18′; or rarely 30′ in diameter, spreading branches forming a handsome symmetrical slender-pyramid, the lower branches soon dying from trees crowded in the forest, and slender branchlets pale yellow-green and coated with fine pubescence at first, becoming light gray tinged with red, and often when four or five years old with purple. Winter-buds nearly globose, ⅛′—¼′ in diameter, with lustrous dark orange-green scales. Bark on old trees often ½′ thick, rich brown, much broken on the surface into small plates covered with scales. Wood light, soft, not strong, coarse-grained, perishable, pale brown streaked with yellow, with thick lighter colored sapwood; occasionally made into lumber principally used for packing-cases. From the bark of this tree oil of fir used in the arts and in medicine is obtained. Distribution. From the interior of the Labrador peninsula westward to the shores of Lesser Slave Lake, southward through Newfoundland, the maritime provinces of Canada, Quebec and Ontario, northern New England, northern New York, northern Michigan to the shores of Saginaw Bay, and northern Minnesota and northeastern Iowa, and along the Appalachian Mountains from western Massachusetts and the Catskills of New York to the high mountains of southwestern Virginia; common and often forming a considerable part of the forest on low swampy ground; on well-drained hillsides sometimes singly in forests of spruce or forming small almost impenetrable thickets; in northern Wisconsin and vicinity occurs a form with longer and more crowded leaves and larger cones (var. _macrocarpa_ Kent); near the timber-line on the mountains of New England and New York reduced to a low almost prostrate shrub.