HAMAMELIDER, SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 7 
LIQUIDAMBAR. 
FLowers usually unisexual, capitate, apetalous; stamens indefinite in globular 
heads ; ovary 2-celled; ovules indefinite, suspended. Fruit a spherical head of woody 
carpels consolidated by their bases. Leaves alternate, palmately lobed, stipulate, 
deciduous. 
Liquidambar, Linnzus, Gen. ed. 2, 463 (1742). — Adan- Hooker, Gen. i. 669. — Baillon, Hist. Pl. iii. 461 (excl. 
son, Fam. Pl. ii. 376.— A. L. de Jussieu, Gen. 410. — Altingia). — Engler & Prantl, Pflanzenfam. iii. pt. ii. 
Endlicher, Gen. 289. — Meisner, Gen. 347. — Bentham & 123. 
Trees, with balsamic juices, scaly bark, terete often winged branchlets, scaly buds, and fibrous 
roots. Leaves plicate in vernation, alternate, palmately lobed, glandular-serrate, long-petiolate, decidu- 
ous ; stipules lanceolate, acute, caducous. Flowers moneecious or occasionally perfect, in capitate heads 
surrounded by involucres of four deciduous bracts, the males in terminal racemes, the females in 
solitary long pedunculate heads from the axils of the upper leaves. Male flowers destitute of calyx 
and corolla ; stamens indefinite, interspersed with minute scales; filaments filiform, shorter than the 
oblong obcordate introrse longitudinally dehiscent anthers attached by their bases. Female flowers 
surrounded by mammiformed or long-awned scales, the whole confluent into globular heads; calyx-limb 
short or nearly obsolete ; stamens generally four, inserted on the summit of the obconic calyx; anthers 
minute, usually rudimentary or abortive, rarely fertile; ovary inserted in the bottom of the concave 
receptacle, partly inferior, two-celled, the carpels produced into an elongated subulate recurved persist- 
ent style stigmatic on its inner face; ovules indefinite, suspended from an axile placenta, anatropous ; 
micropyle superior, raphe ventral. Fruit a globose multicapsular head armed with the hardened 
incurved styles; capsules free above, septicidally dehiscent at the apex, the epicarp thick and woody, 
the endocarp thin, corneous, lustrous on the inner surface, separable. Seeds usually solitary, or two by 
the abortion of many ovules, compressed, angulate; testa opaque, crustaceous, produced into a short 
membranaceous obovate wing rounded at the apex. Embryo surrounded by thin fleshy albumen; 
cotyledons oblong, flat, the radicle terete turned towards the lateral hilum. 
Liquidambar is now confined to the eastern United States, to central and southern Mexico, Central 
America, the Orient, and middle and southeastern China; although in the Tertiary epoch the forests 
which clothed the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada in California possessed a Liquidambar,' and the 
immediate ancestor’ of the existing American species inhabited Alaska, Greenland, and the mid-conti- 
nental plateau of North America, and later was widely distributed in the Miocene of Europe, where 
have been found the traces of a second species* similar in the form of its leaves to the present 
representative of the genus in western Asia. Three species are distinguished in the genus as it is 
now usually limited: Liquidambar Styraciflua is American ; Liquidambar orientalis* inhabits a few 
1 Liquidambar Californicum, Lesquereux, Mem. Mus. Comp. Zo%l. 3 Liquidambar protensium, Unger, Icon. Foss. 44, t. 20, f. 27 
vi. pt. ii. 14 (Fossil Plants of the Auriferous Gravel Deposit of the (1852).— Saporta, /. c. 195. 
Sierra Nevada) (1878). — Zittel, Handb. Paleontolog. ii. 624, f. 12. 4 Miller, Dict. ed. 8, No. 2 (1768).— Hooker, Icon. xi. 13, t. 
2 Lesquereux, U. S. Geolog. Surv. viii. 159, t. 32, f.1 (Contrib. 1019.— De Candolle, Prodr. xvi. pt. ii. 158. — Boissier, Fl. Orient. 
Foss. Fl. Western Territories, iii.). —Saporta, Origine Paléontologique ii. 819. — Koch, Dendr. ii. 465. 
des Arbres, 194. — Zittel, 0. c. f. 1-7. Liquidambar imberbe, Aiton, Hort. Kew. iii. 365 (1789). 
The Oriental Liquidambar is described as a handsome tree attain- 
