206 JOURNAL OP THE ARNOLD ARBORETUM [vol. hi 



distinct in the roughness of the upper surface of the leaves of the New 

 York plant at the time the flowers open, caused by the bases of the hairs 

 which cover it as the leaves unfold, those of C. kingstonensis being always 

 glabrous. 



Betula neoalaskana, n. nom. — Betula alascana Sargent in Bot. Gaz. 



xxxi. 236 (1901), not Lesquereux in Proc. U. S. Nat. Mus. v. 446 (1883). 

 Dr. C. V. Piper calls my attention to this earlier use of the name 

 Betula alaskana for a fossil tree necessitating a new name for the existing 

 species. 



Gleditsia texana Sargent. 



This species was based on a grove of trees growing near Brazoria in 

 the valley of the lower Brazos River in Tezas. When these trees were 

 described in 1901 only the Brazoria trees were known but since 1901 

 specimens of what is evidently the same tree have been collected on the 

 banks of the Red River near Shreveport, Louisiana, at Yazoo City, Miss- 

 issippi, and by a roadside 3^2 naile west of Skelton, Gibson County, Indiana 

 (C. C. Deam No. 35,123, September 27, 1921). On the Brazos River 

 G. texana grows in company with G. triacanthos Linnaeus and G. aquatica 

 Marshall and these species occur in the other localities w r here this tree has 

 been met with; and as only a few individuals have been found in widely 

 scattered localities there seems every reason to believe that G. texana is 

 a hybrid of G. triacanthos and G. aquatica. 



The trees have the habit of G. triacanthos and the branches of the Texas 

 tree are unarmed but those from Louisiana are furnished with stout 

 simple spines and on the Indiana tree the spines are stout or compound. 

 The leaves of these trees resemble those of G. triacanthos , but they all 

 have short thin walled fruit without the pulp of that species and in this 

 resemble G. aquatica. On one of the Louisiana specimens the fruit varies 

 in length from 6-11 cm. The longest of these fruits have the straight 

 margins and the rounded base of that of G. triacanthos, on some of the 

 shortened fruits the margins are more or less contracted between the 

 seeds and the shortest are one-seeded and generally narrowed into a long 

 cuneate base. The length of the fruits of the Mississippi specimen 

 collected by S. M. Tracy are 10 cm. long with a rounded base, deeply con- 

 trated between the three seeds and the shorter is 4 cm. long with a stipe- 

 like base and one seed. 



Thomas Nuttall landed in January 1819, on an island in the Mississippi 



River near the mouth of White River, Arkansas "and for the first time 

 recognized the short podded, honey-locust (Gleditsia braehycarpa), a 

 distinct species, intermediate with the common kind (G. triacanthos) and 

 the one-seeded locust (G. monospcrma), differing from G. triacanthos in 

 the persisting fasciculated legumes, as well as in their shortness and want 



