498 WOODY PLANTS OF MASSACHUSETTS. 



The flowers are small, yellowish-green, very delicate, in an 

 erect or nodding, slender, terminal raceme, five to six inches 

 long. Partial flower-stalk a thread one third of an inch long. 

 Calyx ending in 5 downy lobes, alternate with which are the 

 slender, linear-lanceolate petals, broader at the end, half as 

 long as the stamens. Stamens 8, rising from a glandular, yel- 

 low disk, encircling the germ, which, in the barren flowers, is 

 replaced by a tuft of white hairs. A few of the lower flowers 

 in each raceme are usually fertile, and in them the centre of 

 the much smaller disk is occupied by the two-pointed germ. 



This plant, like the previous one, is rarely found except in 

 the forest. It occurs in moist, rocky, mountainous land, in all 

 parts of the State. It assumes, towards autumn, various rich 

 shades of red, and, as sometimes seen, eighteen or twenty feet 

 high, hanging over the sides of a road through woods, with its 

 clusters of fruit beneath the leaves, turning yellowish when the 

 leaf-stalks are scarlet, it has considerable beauty. Like the 

 previous species, it may be much improved in size by engraft- 

 ing on the larger species of maple. 



