Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/351

Rh Alleghanies, in what might be called the interior hardwood region, and forms nearly pure stands, commonly called cedar glades, in Middle Tennessee and northern Alabama. (Of the numerous places named Lebanon in the United States it is altogether probable that those in Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama and Florida, if not most of the others, were named from the presence of cedar trees, although our cedar bears little resemblance to Cedrus Libani, the classical cedar of Lebanon.)

The soil in which this tree grows is usually dry, and nearly always thin or rocky, but it varies greatly in chemical composition. In Alabama, Tennessee and some other parts of the country the cedar is believed to prefer calcareous soils, but this does not seem to be true throughout its range, for it grows in many places where no lime can be detected without a careful chemical analysis.

This species is very sensitive to fire, and the places frequented by it, such as pastures, fence-rows, edges of marshes, dunes, rocks, bluffs, hammocks, etc., are all pretty well protected from fire in one way or another. In fact exemption from fire seems to be the only significant character that its diverse habitats have in common, from which we may conclude that that governs its local distribution more than anything else.

The wood of the cedar is very durable, but now used mostly for pencils, in which this quality is not taken advantage of. Eepresentatives of the pencil-makers have scoured the country pretty thoroughly for it, and few large straight-grained trees have escaped them, even in small groves in the most out-of-the-way places in the South. Although it is not separated from some other species in the census returns, the cedar cut in 1909 in Tennessee (8,927,000 feet), Missouri (2,984,000 feet) and Alabama (2,869,000 feet) must be all or nearly all of this species.

The Southern White Cedar or "Juniper" {Chamœcyparis thyoides) is the only conifer that grows both in the glaciated region and in the coastal plain and nowhere else. It ranges from New Hampshire to Mississippi, but is not known more than 200 miles inland, or southeast of a straight line drawn from Charleston to Apalachicola (which excludes most of Florida); and there are several large gaps in its range. It usually grows in dense colonies of several hundred trees or more, much like the spruces farther north.

It is strictly a swamp tree, growing naturally only in permanently saturated soil, or peat. The water of these swamps is exceptionally free from mud, lime (perhaps also sulphur) and other mineral substances, but is usually colored dark brown by vegetable matter. Cities as far