LEITNERIA FLORIDANA. 67 
protected by about a dozen obtusely triangular gray-tomen- 
tose scales, which evidently represent undeveloped leaves 
and some of which usually persist for a year or two at the 
annual nodes, ultimately leaving rings of narrow transverse 
scars marking the site of former winter buds. On mature 
plants the upper axillary buds are generally flower buds, 
and develop in the autumn into oblong erect subsessile 
hairy catkins about half an inch long, surrounded at base 
by the bud scales, which pass into the very acute scales of 
the inflorescence. The trees are dioecious, and while the 
catkin character of the flower shoots is very evident on 
the staminate trees, it is much less noticeable on pistillate 
trees, the catkins of which are not above half the thickness 
of the others, and with correspondingly narrower scales. 
The lateral leaf buds are half ovoid, small, appressed to the 
stem, and protected by a few scales similar to those of the 
terminal bud. So far as has been observed, no super- 
numerary buds, either collateral or superposed, occur. 
The leaves are lanceolate to elliptical lanceolate, acute at 
each end, entire, very narrowly revolute, 3 to 4 inches long, 
on half-round petioles about 1 in. long, and densely ap- 
pressed villous, with a few interspersed clavate glandular 
hairs, especially on the petiole, and evident only on close in- 
spection. With age they may become as much as 3  X 7 in. 
with petioles 2 to 3 in. long, and are then glabrate and some- 
what glossy above except along the midrib and principal 
veins, thick and of coriaceous texture, and finally very 
rugose on the paler under surface from the prominence of 
even the finer veins. Stipules have not been seen.* 
The flowers expand before the leaves, early in March, 
when Acer rubrum Drummondii is in bloom. The stam- 
*In Leitneria Floridana stipules are said to occur by Baillon, Hist. 
des Plantes, vi. 241; Van Tieghem & Lecomte, Bull. Soc. Bot. de France, 
xxxiii. 184; and Heim, Recherches sur les Diptérocarpacées, — Thesis, 
Paris, 1892,—-176. They are not found by Chapman, FI. So. U. S. 428; 
Oliver, Hooker’s Icones Plant. ser. 3, i. pl. 1044; and Bentham & Hooker, 
Genera Plantarun, iii. 397. 
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