Descr. A shrub or small tree, everywhere quite glabrous ; 
branches slender, green. Leaves three to ten inches long, 
pinnate or 2-pinnate; leaflets one to three inches long, 
sessile or petioled, elliptic or lanceolate, quite entire, toothed, 
lobed or pinnatifid, and cut into distant short or long, broad 
or narrow lobes, glaucous beneath; rachis simple winged or 
dilated and leafy. Uméels small, half an inch in diameter, 
green, in corymbs, racemes, or panicles ; peduncles slender ; 
pedicels very short, jointed below the flower. /Jowers one- 
sixth of an inch in diameter. Calyz-tube hemispheric, con- 
tracted into a short stipe ; limb 4—5-toothed. Petals four 
to five, spreading with incurved tips; those of the female 
flowers larger and often cohering at the tips, smaller and ~ 
more spreading in the males. Fruit a watery transparent 
berry, one-third of an inch in diameter, crowned with a minute 
black calyx limb, and two slender recurved styles; pyrenes 
two, plano-convex, with two striate dorsal ribs—J. D. 
Fig. 1 and 2, Male flowers; 3, calyx, and styles of ditto; 4, ripe fruit; 
5, transverse section of ditto :—all magnified. 
