CELASTRACER. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 13 
GYMINDA. 
FLOWERS unisexual ; calyx 4-lobed, the lobes imbricated in estivation; petals 4, 
imbricated in estivation; ovary 2-celled; ovules solitary, suspended. Fruit drupa- 
ceous, 2-celled, 1 to 2-seeded. 
Gyminda, Sargent, Garden and Forest, iv. 4. Myginda (sec. Gyminda), Grisebach, Cat. Pl. Cub. 55. 
A slender tree or shrub, with pale quadrangular branchlets and minute acuminate buds. Leaves 
opposite, short-petioled, oblong-obovate, rounded and sometimes emarginate at the apex, entire or 
remotely crenulate-serrate above the middle, with revolute thickened margins, feather-veined, coriaceous, 
persistent ; stipules minute, acuminate, membranaceous, caducous. Flowers pedicellate, in axillary 
pedunculate few-flowered dichotomously branched cymes, furnished immediately below the calyx with 
two minute bracts. Calyx minute, persistent, with a short urceolate tube and rounded lobes. Disk 
fleshy, filling the tube of the calyx, cup-shaped, slightly four-lobed. Petals entire, obovate, rounded at 
the apex, reflexed, much longer than the lobes of the calyx, white. Stamens four, opposite the sepals, 
inserted in the lobes of the disk, exserted; wanting in the fertile flower; filaments slender, subulate, 
incurved ; anthers attached below the middle, oblong, two-celled, the contiguous cells opening longitu- 
dinally. Ovary oblong, sessile, confluent with the disk, two-celled, crowned with the large two-lobed 
sessile stigma; rudimentary, deeply cleft in the sterile flower ; ovules suspended from the apex of the 
cell, anatropous; raphe dorsal; micropyle superior. Fruit black or dark blue, oval or obovate, the size 
of a pea, crowned with the remnants of the persistent stigma, often one-celled by abortion; sarcocarp 
rather thin; putamen thick, crustaceous. Seed oblong, suspended; testa membranaceous; albumen 
thin, fleshy. Embryo axile; cotyledons ovate, foliaceous ; radicle superior, next the hilum. 
The wood of Gyminda is very heavy, hard, and close-grained, the layers of annual growth and 
numerous medullary rays being barely distinguishable. It is dark brown or nearly black, with thick 
light brown sapwood composed of seventy-five or eighty layers of annual growth. The specific gravity 
of the absolutely dry wood is 0.9048, a cubic foot weighing 56.39 pounds.’ 
The generic name, first used by Grisebach’ for a section of Myginda, is formed by transposing the 
first three letters of that name. One species is known. 
1 The wood of this tree is produced very slowly. A specimen in 
the Jesup Collection of North American Woods in the American 
Museum of Natural History in New York is three and a half 
inches in diameter, and contains one hundred layers of annual 
growth. 
2 Heinrich Rudolph August Grisebach (1814-1879) was born in 
Hannover and died in Gottingen, where he was professor of botany 
in the University. Grisebach published in 1839 a monograph of 
the Gentian family, and two years later an account of the plants 
collected by him during a botanical journey through Roumelia. In 
1864 appeared his Flora of the British West Indies, one of a series 
of colonial Floras prepared under the auspices of the British 
government ; and in 1866 his Catalogus Plantarum Cubensium, an 
account of the collections made by Charles Wright in that island. 
The most important of Grisebach’s contributions to science relate 
to botanical geography, a subject to which he gave particular at- 
tention and upon which he wrote voluminously. His Vegetation 
der Erde, published in 1872, is one of the classical books on the 
subject, and the author’s crowning scientific effort. Grisehachia, 
a genus of heath-like plants native of south Africa, was dedicated 
to him by Klotzsch. 
