260 BALSAM TREES OF SCINDE. 
bush, with thick branches spreading on all sides. In barren and rocky 
situations the gnarled limbs stretch from the crown along the surface of 
the rock. Branches knotty and crooked, with the ash-coloured bark 
peeling off in flakes, leaving exposed the under-bark which separates 
in large rolls, much resembling those of Betula Rhojputia ; the sub- 
terminal branches short and spiniform, with buds and secondary spines 
on them. Leaves and flowers collected at the end of short stunted 
buds, which finally develope into-spines, or become young soft shoots, 
on which the leaves are arranged alternately. 
Leaves smooth and shining, obovate, almost sessile, shallowly tooth- 
ed anteriorly, the tapering base entire; in thriving plants and luxuri- 
ant shoots inciso-serrate, cuneate-obovate, rhomboid or oval-acute, 
with a longer stalk from whose summit spring one, or more generally 
two, lateral leaflets, which are sometimes minute and entire, but gene- 
rally serrated, half the size of the terminal leaflet, and overlapping it in 
its induplicate vernation. 
Young leaves, while in the bud, covered with glandular hairs which 
soon drop off, a few only remai ing in the axil and on the petiole. 
Flowers minute, in little bundles at the ends of the non-developed buds, 
with or without leaves, subsessile, with three minute bracts to each 
flower ; imperfectly unisexual, dicecious. MALES, with ovary small and 
barren; FEMALES, with short stamens and small imperfect anthers. 
Calyx cylindrical, 4— 5-toothed, thickly covered externally (as are 
the bracts) with glandular hairs; tube splitting as the fruit developes, 
and remaining spread out and withered at its base. Corolla of four, 
rarely five, strap-shaped, brownish-red petals ; margins slightly over- 
lapping in zestivation, with an inflexed mucro; tips of the petals curled 
back. Stamens 8—10, the four opposite the petals, shorter than the 
others. Disk 8—10-toothed, the alternate sinuses deeper and in these 
are situate the short stamens. Ovary bisuleate, two-celled, rarely 
creased number of the carpellary leaves. Ovary tapering upwards and 
passing imperceptibly into the short and thick style. Stigma obscurely 
. two-lobed. Ovules two in each cell, collateral, suspended. Drupe red 
when: ripe, ovate-acuminated, often bluntly angular, marked by two 
sutures along which'the epicarp and a portion of the mesocarp fall 
from the base in two fleshy valves, whose position is that of the car- 
