A34 ORD. XXV. Lementacce. MIMOSA CATECHU. 
ACCORDING to Mr. Kerr, this small tree grows to twelve feet 
in height, and to one foot in diameter; it is covered with a thick 
rough brown bark, and towards the top divides into many close 
branches: the leaves are bipinnated, or doubly winged, and are 
placed alternately upon the younger branches: the partial pinnz 
are nearly two inches long, and are commonly from fifteen to 
thirty pair, having small glands inserted between the pinne: 
each wing is usually furnished with about forty pair of pinnule 
or linear lobes, beset with short hairs: the spines are short, recur- 
ved, and placed in pairs at the bases of each leaf: the flowers are 
hermaphrodite and male, and stand in close spikes, which arise 
from the axilla of the leaves, and are four or five inches long: 
the calyx is tubular, hairy, and divides at the limb into five oval 
pointed segments; the coroila is monopetalous, whitish, and of 
the same form as the calyx, but twice its length: the filaments are 
numerous, | capillary, double the length of the corolla, adhering at 
the base of the germen, and crowned with roundish anthers: the 
germen is oval, and supports a slender style, which is of the 
length of the filaments, and terminated by a simple stigma: the 
fruit, or pod, is lance-shaped, brown, smooth, compressed, with an 
undulated thin margin; it contains six or eight roundish flattened . 
seeds, which produce a nauseous odour when chewed. This tree 
‘grows plentifully on the mountainous parts of Indostan, where it 
flowers in June. | 
An Indian drug, known by the name of Terra Japonica, and now 
nrore properly called Catechu, has long been an officinal medicine 
in Europe; and though scon discovered by chemical analysis to be 
of vegetable origin, yet neither was the plant from which it is 
produced, nor the process by which it is prepared, sufficiently 
ascertained for near a century afterwards. Writers on the Materia 
Medica very generally, from the time of Clusius, considered the 
Catechu to be extracted from the seeds of a nut, the produce of 
a species of palm; (Areca, or Beetle-nut) and conformably to this 
opinion, Linnzus, in both the editions of his Mat. Med. refers this 
