We have had no acquaintance with American pitch pine as a growing tree. As a timber, it is superior in several respects to all the others, having a great deal more resinous matter, so much, as often to render it semitranslucent. It is strong and weighty, and is used as a naval timber for most of the purposes to which other pine timber is applied. It forms the very best bottom planking. The shipwrights of the docks at Devonport will attest its quality, as the bottom planking of the Gibraltar of 80 guns: this vessel carried home to England from the Mediterranean, a piece of coral rock of about ten tons weight sticking in her bottom, her preservation {73} in all probability resulting from the adhesive quality of this timber. Its great weight is, however, a considerable inconveniency attending its use as spars, and the abundance of resin, we should think, would unfit it for tree-nails; resinous tree-nails,—probably from some derangement of the structure or disposition to chemical change produced in the resin by the very great pressure of the hard driving,—soon corrupting and infecting the adjacent wood. In some cases we have also known very resinous Baltic plank decay soon in vessels. The pitch pine, from the quantity of resin, contracts little in drying, at least for a long time, till the resin itself begins to dry up. It forms the best house-floors we have seen, being strong and durable, continuing close at joinings, and the fibre not readily taking in moisture when washed. Our red-wood pine, when come to some age, is in wet ground attacked by rot, which commences in the bulb and adjacent roots and stem, in a manner very similar to the rot in larch. The red-wood also approaches nearer to the outside where this rot exists, and on the side of the tree where the rot is greatest. Most of our planted red pine forest, especially in poor wet tills, and in all flat sandy moorish ground of close subsoil, fall by decay at from 30 to 60 years old. This decay is gradual, owing to the {74} difference in strength of constitution of the individuals. Closeness of rearing and consequent tall nakedness of stem, and disproportion of leaves to stem, would alone induce this in a few years longer even in good soil, excepting perhaps in protected narrow dells; but the decay commences much sooner when the soil is unfavourable, and is no doubt accelerated by the mode of extracting the seeds by kiln-drying the cones, and by using a weak variety of the plant. The approach of this decay may often be noticed, several years previous, in the saw-cross section of the stem mid-way up the tree—an irregular portion of the section appearing of a different shade, from breaking off free and irregular before the teeth of the saw, and not having so much fibrous cover as the healthy part. When Scots fir rises naturally, it is not nearly so subject to this decay even in very inferior soils: the plants having generally much more room from the