752 TREES OF NORTn AMERICA 



smooth gray inner bark. Wood heavy, with black heartwood often streaked with 

 yellow and clear bright yellow sapwood; used in turnery and for the handles of tools. 

 The fruit, which is exceedingly austere until it is fully ripe, stains black, and is 

 sometimes used by Mexicans in the valley of the Rio Grande to dye sheepskins. 



Distribution. Valleys of the Colorado and Concho rivers, Texas, to Nuevo Leon; 

 abundant in western and southern Texas; in the neighborhood of the coast on the 

 borders of prairies in rich moist soil; westward on dry rocky mesas and in isolated 

 caiions; very common and of its largest size in the region between the Sierra Madre 

 and the coast of the Gulf of Mexico in Nuevo Leon. 



LIV. SYMPLOCACE^. 



Trees or shrubs, with simple pubescence, watery juice, scaly buds, and 

 fibrous roots. Leaves simple, alternate, coriaceous or membranaceous, pin- 

 iiately veined, usually becoming yellow in drying, without stipules. Flowers 

 regular, perfect, or polygamo-dioecious, on ebracteolate pedicels, in dense or 

 lax axillary spikes or racemes, with small caducous bracts ; calyx campanulate, 

 5-lobed, open in the bud, the tube adnate to the ovary, enlarged after anthesis ; 

 corolla divided nearly to the base into 5 lobes imbricated in the bud ; disk ; 

 stamens numerous, inserted in many series on the base of the corolla ; fila- 

 ments filiform, more or less united below into clusters ; anthers oblong, introrse, 

 2-celled, the cells lateral, opening longitudinally ; ovary contracted into a simple 

 style, with an entire or slightly lobed terminal stigma ; ovules 2 or rarely 4 in 

 each cell,* suspended from its inner angle, anatropous ; raphe ventral ; micro- 

 pyle superior. Fruit' a drupe (in the North American species), crowned with 

 the persistent lobes of the calyx, with thin dry flesh and a bony 1-seeded stone. 

 Seed oblong, suspended; seed-coat membranaceous; embryo terete, erect in 

 copious fleshy albumen ; cotyledons much shorter than the long slender radi- 

 cle turned toward the broad conspicuous hilum. 



The family consists of the genus Symplocos. 



1. SYMPLOCOS, L'Her. 



Characters of the family. 



Symplocos with two hundred and eighty described species inhabits chiefly the 

 warmer parts of America, Asia, and Australia, one species occurring in the southern 

 United States. 



Symplocos contains a yellow coloring matter, and the bark and leaves of some 

 species have medical properties. 



The generic name, from ^vfxTr\oK05, relates to the union of the filaments of some of 

 the species. 



1. Symplocos tinctoria, L'Her. Sweet Leaf. Horse Sugar. 



Leaves re volute in the bud, oblong, acute or acuminate at the apex, gradually 

 narrowed at the base, obscurely crenulate-serrate, with remote teeth, or sometimes 

 nearly entire, when they unfold coated with pale tomentum below, glabrous or to- 

 mentose above, and furnished on the margins with minute dark caducous glands, 

 and at maturity subcoriaceous, dark green and lustrous above, paler and pubescent 

 below, 5'-6' long and l'-2' wide, with broad midribs rounded and sometimes puberu- 

 lous on the upper side, inconspicuous arcuate veins, and reticulate veinlets, north- 

 ward and at high elevations falling in the autumn, and southward remaining on the 



