44 JOURNAL OF THE ARNOLD ARBORETUM [vol. v 



I have never seen a wild Buckeye with flowers which resemble those 

 figured by Lindley, but Colonel Henry A. du Pont of Winterthur, Delaware, 

 has recently called my attention to two trees planted by his grandfather 

 the leaves and flowers of which cannot be distinguished from those repre- 

 sented by Lindley 's plate. 



Eleuth&re Iv6n6e du Pont de Nemours, the founder of the Dupont 

 Family in America, came from France in 1800 to America where lie lived 

 first at Hackensack, New Jersey, but in July 1802 moved to Delaware 

 where he established his powder works and built a substantial stone man- 

 sion on the banks of the Brandywine in Christiana Hundred, about four 

 miles from Wilmington at the place which has now for one hundred and 

 twenty-one years been known as Eleuthcrean Mills. 



A family tradition,, preserved by the now oldest Du Pont who as a boy 

 gathered nuts from the trees, records the fact that Mr. Antoine Pidermann 

 who had married Du Pont's second daughter Evelina and had become 

 associated with him in the powder business had gone to New Orleans 

 sometime after 1820to inspect there the agency of the powder mills and had 

 returned home on horseback through Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, 

 and that during this journey he had picked up the nuts from which the 

 Eleuthcrean Mills trees had grown. 



The soil on the steep slope in the rear of the Du Pont mansion is deep 

 and rich, as is shown by the size and vigor of the native Oak-trees which 

 are growing in it, and the two large Buckeyes on this slope, the trees which 

 in the color of their flowers so closely resemble the flowers of Lindley's 

 plate, are 32 and 28 metres high with a trunk girth at 3 feet from the 

 ground of 2.35 and of 2.10 metres. The larger of these two trees 

 is the tallest and largest Buckeye of any variety of which authentic 

 measurements have been made. 



The conclusion which an examination of these Eleutherean Mills 

 Buckeyes has forced on me is that there are no real characters by which 

 the plant I have named Aescuhtx gcorgiana can be distinguished from the 

 Aesculus ncglccia of Lindley which, if this view is accepted, becomes the 

 type of the species of the Octandrae which in various forms is widely 

 distributed in the Piedmont region of North and South Carolina and north- 

 ern Georgia, occasionally ascending the Blue Ridge in North Carolina to 

 altitudes of 3000 feet, and is common in central Georgia, ranging east into 

 Richmond County and south into northern and central Alabama, and to 

 an isolated station near Pensacola in Florida. 



It varies from a tree 17 or 20 metres tall to a shrub which flowers and 

 produces abundant fruit when not more than 1 metre high. The leaflets 

 of the type and of one variety are glabrous on the lower surface, but in 

 one form they are pubescent, and on another densely tomentose. The 

 flowers of A. neglecta are borne in elongated slender clusters, but in the 

 plants now considered its varieties the flower-clusters are often short and 

 crowded and the petals are yellow, more or less marked with red or 

 entirely red. 



