LEGUMINOS&. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 123 
ACACIA WRIGHTII. 
Cat’s Claw. 
LEGUMEs broad, straight, or somewhat contracted between the seeds; seeds nar- 
rowly obovate or ovate. Leaves glabrous or slightly pubescent. 
Acacia Wrightii, Bentham; Gray, Smithsonian Contrib. Mex. Bound. Surv. 61.— Watson, Proc. Am. Acad. 
iii. 64 (Pl. Wright. i.); Trans. Linn. Soc. xxx. 521 xvii. 351. — Sargent, Forest Trees N. Am. 10th Census 
(Rev. Mim.).— Gray, Smithsonian Contrib. v. 53 (Pl. U. S. ix. 63. 
Wright. ii.). — Walpers, Ann. iv. 626.— Torrey, Bot. 
A small tree, occasionally twenty-five to thirty feet in height, with a short trunk ten or twelve 
inches in diameter and spreading branches forming a low wide irregular head; or more frequently a 
shrub with many stems often only a few feet high. The bark of the trunk is an eighth of an inch 
thick and furrowed, the surface of the ridges separating into thin narrow scales. The branches are 
armed with occasional stout recurved infrastipular chestnut-brown spines a quarter of an inch long, 
compressed towards the broad base and very sharp-pointed, or are rarely unarmed. The branchlets 
when they first appear are somewhat striately angled, glabrous, and pale yellow-brown or dark red- 
brown, turning pale gray in their second year. The leaves are alternate on the young branchlets or 
fascicled in the axils of former leaves, glabrous or slightly pubescent especially on the petioles and 
rachises, with two to six pinne, and one or two inches in length. The petioles are slender, a third 
of an inch long, and eglandular or furnished with small convex glands; the pinne are four to ten- 
foliolate. The leaflets are obliquely obovate-oblong, obtuse, rounded and often apiculate, sessile or 
short-petiolulate, two or sometimes three-nerved, reticulate-veined, rigid, bright green and rather paler 
on the lower than on the upper surface, and from a sixteenth to a quarter of an inch long. The 
stipules are linear, acute, a sixteenth of an inch in length, and caducous. The flowers, which appear 
from the end of March to the end of May, are produced in narrow spikes an inch and a half long, often 
interrupted below the middle, on slender fascicled axillary pubescent or sometimes glabrous peduncles ; 
they are borne on thin pubescent pedicels from the axils of minute caducous bractlets, and are light 
yellow and fragrant, with stamens a quarter of an inch in length. The calyx is obscurely five-lobed, 
pubescent on the outer surface, and half as long as the spatulate petals, which are slightly united at 
the base and ciliate on the margins. The ovary is long-stalked and clothed with long pale hairs. The 
legumes, which are fully grown early m the summer and fall in the autumn, are indehiscent, slightly 
faleate, compressed, stipitate, oblique at the base, rounded and short-pointed at the apex, two to four 
inches in length, an inch in breadth, with thick straight or irregularly contracted margins and thin 
papery walls conspicuously marked by narrow horizontal reticulated veins. The seeds, which are sus- 
pended transversely on long slender funicles, are narrowly obovate, compressed, and a quarter of an 
inch long; the testa is thin, cartilaginous, light brown, and marked on the two sides of the seed with 
a large oval depression. The embryo is compressed, with oval cotyledons and an included radicle. 
Acacia Wrightii is distributed from the neighborhood of New Braunfels in the valley of the 
Guadaloupe River in western Texas to the Sierra Madre in Nuevo Leon. It is most common and grows 
to the largest size south of the Rio Grande, where it abounds on dry gravelly mesas and foothills. 
The wood of Acacia Wrightii is very heavy, hard, and close-grained, with the layers of annual 
growth marked by one or two rows of small open ducts, and contains many smaller scattered open ducts 
and obscure medullary rays. The color is a bright clear brown streaked with red and yellow, the thin 
