1881.J NATURAL SCIENCES OF PHILADELPHIA. 123 



QTJERCUS RUBRA, L., var. TEXANA. 

 BY S. B. BUCKLEY, PH. D. 



Quercus rubra is distributed over a larger area than any other 

 oak in North America. According to Dr. Richardson, it is the 

 most northern of oaks ; he found it on the Saskatchewan and the 

 rocks of Lake Xamakeen, in British America. It is in Nova 

 Scotia, and southward through the United States to El Paso 

 County, in the northwest part of Texas. The writer saw it in 

 the coves of the mountains near Fort Davis, in the summer of 

 1875, at elevations of fi-om 5000 to 6000 feet above the sea. The 

 differences of soil and climate in which it grows cause it to vary 

 so much in size, wood, leaves and acorns that the two extremes of 

 difference considered apart from intermediate forms, would make 

 two ver}^ good species. The Texas form, growing on limestone 

 hills and coves and little valley's in the vicinitj' of Austin and 

 westward, has been called Q. ijalustris hy Torrey and Gra}', 

 in the Report of the Botany of the Pacific Railroad. Report of 

 Capt. John Pope, p. 173; also in other reports of theirs on the 

 Botany of Texas. It has also been called Q. palustris by Dr. 

 Engelmann, when he named the plants collected by Elihu Hall in 

 Texas in 1872. (See Hall's Plantee Texana?, p. 21, Nos. 604 and 

 605.) Hall obtained specimens of it here in June, and I sent 

 him acorns of it in the fall, and he informed me that Dr. Engel- 

 mann regarded it as Q. palustris. I have never seen the true Q. 

 palustris farther south than the vicinity of Washington. Prof Sar- 

 gent and Mr. Mohr both inform me that they do not know of its 

 being in the Southern States, and so says Michaux, in his " North 

 American Sjdva." It is not in Chapman's " Flora of the Southern 

 States." These things in part, joined with the characteristics of 

 the oak as growing here, caused me to describe it as a new species. 

 (See Q. Texana, in Young's " Flora of Texas," p. 507.) If not a 

 good species, it is a well-marked variety of Q. rubra. Let it then 

 be called Q. rubra var. Texana. 



Last December, Mr. Charles Mohr and myself got sections of its 

 wood, etc., which he sent North for the Department of Forestry 

 of the Government Census Bureau. We then thought it to be a 

 good species. A few daA^s after, on the bottom lands of Walnut 

 Creek, about six miles below Austin, we found the acorns and 



