S4 SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. SAPINDACEE. 
to a minute point surrounded by a tuft of pale hairs. The style is columnar and almost as long as the 
petals, with very short stigmatic lobes. The fruit is almost glabrous, with more or less divergent wings, 
and is rather more than an inch across. It is fully grown and bright red in July, turning brown late 
in the autumn, the racemes then being pendulous or nearly so. The seed is an eighth of an inch long, 
with a smooth dark testa and thick fleshy cotyledons. 
Alcer spicatum is common in all the region from the valley of the lower St. Lawrence River to 
northern Minnesota and the Saskatchewan, and extends southward through the northern states and 
along the Appalachian Mountains to northern Georgia. It is represented in the flora of eastern Asia by 
a plant widely distributed from Manchuria to Japan, hardly distinguishable from the American tree.’ 
Acer spicatum grows on moist rocky hillsides in the shade of other trees, and at the north is rarely 
more than a spreading shrub, becoming really a tree only on the western slopes of the high mountains 
of Tennessee and North Carolina, where it occurs in great abundance in forests of the Sugar Maple, 
the Beech, the Birch, the Hemlock, the Buckeye, and the Ash, often forming a considerable portion of 
the undergrowth. 
The wood of Acer spicatuin is light, soft, and close-grained, with thin inconspicuous medullary 
rays. It is light brown tinged with red, with thick lighter colored sapwood. The specific gravity of 
the absolutely dry wood is 0.5330, a cubic foot weighing 33.22 pounds. 
Acer spicatum, according to Aiton,’ was cultivated in England as early as 1750 by Archibald, 
Duke of Argyll,* but it was not described by any botanist until twenty years later. It is now rarely 
cultivated, although well worth a place in the shrubbery. 
1 A. spicatum, var. Ukurunduense, Maximowicz, Prim. Fl. Amur. A. Ukurunduense, Middendorff, Fl. Ochotsk. No. 78. 
65 ; Bull. Acad. Sci. St. Pétersbourg, xxvi. 439 (Meél. Biol. x. 594). — 2 Hort. Kew. iii. 435. 
Franchet & Savatier, Enum. Pl. Jap. i. 88. — Pax, Engler Bot. 3 See i. 108. 
Jahrb. vii. 189. 
EXPLANATION OF THE PLATES. 
PuaTeE LXXXII. Acer spicatum. 
A flowering branch, natural size. 
. A staminate flower, enlarged. 
Vertical section of a staminate flower, enlarged. 
. An anther, front view, enlarged. 
. Vertical section of a pistillate flower, enlarged. 
Pap wd 
. Vertical section of an ovary, enlarged. 
PuatE LXXXIII. Acer spicatum. 
. A fruiting branch, natural size. 
. Vertical section of a fruit, enlarged. 
A seed, enlarged. 
. An embryo, much magnified. 
oP wb 
. A winter branchlet, natural size. 
