736 



TREES OF NORTH AMERICA 



A tree, 12-15 high, with a straight trunk 6'-T in diameter, stout rigid spread- 

 ing branches forming a compact regular round-topped liead, and slightly many- 

 angled branchlets yellow-green or light orange-colored and coated with short soft 



pale ferrugineous pubescence when they first appear, terete, darker and sometimes 

 reddish brown and marked by orbicular depressed conspicuous leaf-scars and with 

 many scattered pale lenticels in their second year, becoming glabrous and red-brown 

 or ashy gray the following season, without terminal buds. Winter-buds axillary, 

 minute, nearly globose, immersed in the bark. Bark of the trunk thin, smooth, blue- 

 gray, and usually more or less marked by pale or nearly white blotches. "Wood 

 heavy, hard, very close-grained, rich brown, beautifully marked with darker medul- 

 lary rays. 



Distribution. Dry coral soil in the immediate neighborhood of the shore; Sani- 

 bel Island to the southern keys, and to the borders of the Everglades, Florida; 

 exceedingly rare and most abundant and of its largest size on the Marquesas keys; 

 also on the Bahama Islands. 



LII. SAPOTACEiE. 



Trees or shrubs, with milky juice. Leaves alternate, simple, entire, pinnately 

 veined, mostly coriaceous, petiolate, without stipules. Flowers perfect, regular, 

 small, in axillary clusters ; calyx of 5-8 sepals imbricated in the bud, persist- 

 ent under the fruit ; corolla hypogynous, 5-8-cleft, the divisions imbricated in 

 the bud, often with as many or twice as many internal appendages borne on 

 its throat ; disk ; fertile stamens as many as and opposite the divisions of 

 the corolla and inserted on its short tube, often with sterile filaments (stami- 

 nodia) alternate with them ; anthers generally extrorse, 2-celled, the cells open- 

 ing longitudinally ; pistil of united carpels ; ovary sessile, usually 5-celled ; 

 style simple ; ovules solitary in each cell, attached to an axile placenta, ascend- 

 ing, anatropous ; raphe ventral ; micropyle inferior. Fruit baccate, bearing at 

 the apex the remnant of the style, usually 1-celled and 1-seeded. Seed with or 

 without albumen ; embryo large ; radicle terete, inferior. 



This family with thirty-one genera is chiefly tropical and subtropical, with 

 only Bumelia extending in North America into temperate regions. Some of the 



