222 BOTANICAL GAZETTE [march 



Prodr. 17: 178 (in part). 1873. — For this tree of the southern states 

 the name C. mississippiensis has usually been adopted. Bosc pub- 

 lished a brief account, without a name or technical description, of 

 Le Microcoulier de la Louisiana cultivated in France in the Nouveau 

 Cours Complet d^ Agriculture (8:529. 1809), and republished it in 

 the second edition of this work (10:41. 1822). As his plant came 

 from near the mouth of the Mississippi River there is little doubt 

 of its identity with the C. mississippiensis of Spach, for it was 

 Spach who first described this tree as C. mississippiensis, Bosc's 

 earlier C. mississippiensis being a nomen nudum and 10 years later 

 than C. laevigata of Willdenow which, following K. Koch, must 

 be taken up for our tree. A cotype of C. Berlandierii Klotzsch 

 (no. 2318), collected by Berlandier at "Matamoras de TamauHpas," 

 April 1 83 1, is preserved in the Gray Herbarium on a sheet with 

 Berlandier^s no. 885, also collected at Matamoras in April 1831. 

 A fragmentary specimen with flowers, collected by Berlandier in 

 February 1828 (no. 1487-2271), a fruiting branch without locality 

 or date and numbered 2429 on a label printed for the Gray Her- 

 barium, and a vigorous shoot (no. 2429-999), collected by Ber- 

 landier , May 1824, "De Goliad a Bexa," are mounted on another 

 sheet. The leaves and fruit of these Berlandier specimens only 

 differ in their smaller size from specimens of the leaves and fruit 

 of C. laevigata grown on the rich bottom lands of the Mississippi 

 Valley, a difference which the dryness of the region where Ber- 

 landier collected them explains. 



C. laevigata, when it grows under favorable conditions, is a tree 

 sometimes 30 m. high, with somewhat pendulous branches and 

 slender, glabrous, red-brown branchlets. The leaves are thin, 

 usually oblong-lanceolate, long-pointed and acuminate at apex, 

 unsymmetrically rounded and often oblique or cuneate at base, 

 frequently more or less falcate, entire or furnished with a few teeth 

 usually toward the apex, green .on both surfaces, glabrous, smooth 

 or occasionally scabrate above. The fruit is bright orange-red on 

 pedicels shorter or slightly longer than the petioles. 



C. laevigata is distributed from the coast of Virginia to the Everglade Keys 

 of southern Florida and through the Gulf states to the valley of the lower Rio 

 Grande in Nuovo Leon, Mexico, and through eastern Texas and Arkansas to 



