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SIMARUBACEE. (QuAssIA FAMILY.) 
Ours are spiny shrubs with small alternate entire coriaceous or 
scale-like leaves which soon or easily fall, differing essentially from 
Futacee in the dotless leaves and bitter bark. 
1. Castela. Ovary deeply 4-lobed, the fruit of 4 distinct and widely spreading 
short-stipitate 1-seeded drupes: leaves coriaceous. 
2. Keeberlinia. Ovary entire, 2-celled, many-seeded, becoming a small subglobose 
berry: leaves scale-like, caducous, the plant appearing leafless, 
1. CASTELA Turpin. (GOATBUSH. ) 
Low shrubs with spinescent branches and axillary spines, thick rigid 
leaves which are shining above and silvery canescent beneath and with 
revolute margins, small saffron-colored subsessile polygamo-diwcious 
flowers solitary or fascicled in the axils, 4 sepals and much larger petals, 
8 stamens inserted on a fleshy disk, and fruit consisting of 4 distinet 
and widely spreading red drupes (by abortion fewer). 
1. C. Nicholsoni Hook. Shrub 9 to 15 dm. high: leaves lanceolate or oblong- 
linear, mucronulate: stamens hirsute.—Common on gravelly bluffs of the lower Rio 
Grande from Eagle Pass downwards. The bark is intensely bitter and is much used in 
medicine by the Mexicans, who call it “amargoso.” , 
2. KCBBERLINIA Zucc. (JuNco.) 
A curious shrub or sometimes arborescent, apparently destitute of 
leaves, with green stiff very intricate branches tapering into thorns, 
minute scale-like caducous leaves, small white flowers in short lateral 
or umbelliform racemes near the apex of the branchlets, 4 sepals and 
petals, no disk, 8 stamens, and a small subglobose berry. 
1. K. spinosa Zucc. A shrub apparently consisting of nothing but thorns, near 
the ends of which are borne the clusters of small flowers.—Common in the vicinity 
of the Rio Grande from Brownsville to El Paso and throughout western Texas. 
MELIACEH. (MELIA Famity.) 
Trees, chiefly with pinnately compound dotless leaves, stamens twice 
as many as the petals and united up to or beyond the anthers into a 
tube and a several-celled ovary. 
1. MELIA L. 
Trees with alternate bipinnate leaves, flowers in large compound 
panicles, 5 to 6-parted calyx, 5 or 6 linear-spatulate petals, filaments 
united into a cylindrical tube with a 10 to 12-cleft mouth and inclosing 
as many anthers, and a globose berry-like drupe. 
1. M. Azedarach L. (Pripre or InpIA. CHINA TREE.) A tree 9 to 12 m, high; 
leaflets ovate, pointed, toothed: flowers numerous, fragrant, lilac: fruit yellowish, 
the stone bony and 5-celled, with a single seed in each cell.—-A favorite shade tree, 
and extensively naturalized in central and southern Texas. In troduced from Asia, 
