67 
CORNACES. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 
winter is a quarter of an inch or less in length, but, by the time the flowers have expanded, is an inch 
or an inch and a half long. The involucral scales begin to unfold, enlarge, and grow white with the 
first warm days of spring, and when the flowers open, which in Texas takes place in March and in 
Massachusetts in May, when the leaves are half grown, these scales form a flat corolla-like cup three or 
four inches in diameter ; at maturity they are obcordate, an inch or an inch and a half wide, gradually 
narrowed below the middle, the rounded apex notched by its growing round the discolored and thick- 
ened remnants of the portion formed during the previous summer,’ reticulate-veined, and pure white, 
pink, or rarely bright red; they fall after the fading of the flowers. The flower-buds, which are 
collected in close many-flowered cymes, are oblong, obtuse, puberulous with pale hairs, and sessile in the 
axils of broadly ovate nearly triangular minutely apiculate glabrous light green deciduous bractlets. 
The flowers are an eighth of an inch across when expanded ; the calyx is terete, slightly urceolate, 
puberulous, obtusely four-lobed, and light green; the corolla-lobes are strap-shaped, rounded or acute 
at the apex, slightly thickened on the margins, puberulous on the outer surface, glabrous on the imner, 
reflexed after anthesis, and green tipped with yellow; the disk is large and orange-colored, and the 
style is columnar and crowned with a truncate stigma. The fruit ripens in October, usually only three 
or four drupes being developed from a head of flowers; they are surrounded by the remnants of 
abortive flowers and are ovoid, crowned with the remnants of the narrow persistent calyx and with the 
style, bright scarlet, half an inch long and a quarter to half an inch broad, with thin mealy flesh and a 
smooth ovate thick-walled slightly grooved stone, acute at the two ends and containing two oblong 
seeds, or often only one, covered with a thin pale coat. 
Cornus florida is distributed from eastern Massachusetts to southern Ontario” and southwestern 
Missouri,® and southward to central Florida and the valley of the Brazos River in Texas, and reappears 
on the Sierra Madre and several of the other mountain ranges of eastern and southern Mexico.* 
Comparatively rare at the north, the Flowering Dogwood is one of the commonest and most generally 
distributed inhabitants of the deciduous forests of the middle and southern states, growing under the 
shade of taller trees in rich well-drained soil, and from the coast nearly to the summits of the high 
Alleghany Mountains. 
The wood of Cornus florida is heavy, hard, and strong, tough and close-grained, with a satiny 
surface susceptible of receiving a beautiful polish ; it contains numerous conspicuous medullary rays, and 
is brown, sometimes changing to shades of green and red, with lighter colored sapwood composed of 
thirty to forty layers of annual growth. The specific gravity of the absolutely dry wood is 0.8153, a 
cubic foot weighing 50.81 pounds. It is largely used in turnery, for the bearings of machinery, the 
hubs of small wheels, barrel-hoops, the handles of tools, and occasionally for engravers’ blocks. 
The bark, especially that of the roots, which contains a bitter principle, cornin or cornic acid,” is 
astringent and slightly aromatic, and is occasionally used in the form of powder, decoctions, or fluid 
extracts, in the treatment of intermittent and malarial fevers,’ and in homeopathic practice.’ 
The Flowering Dogwood is one of the most beautiful of the small trees of the American forests, 
which it enlivens in early spring with the whiteness of its floral leaves and in autumn with the splendor 
1 Meehan, Proc. Phil. Acad. 1892, 377. 
2 Bell, Geolog. Rep. Can. 1879-80, 55°. — Macoun, Cat. Can. Pl. 
i. 190. 
3 Broadhead, Bot. Gazette, iii. 53. 
4 Hemsley, Bot. Biol. Am. Cent. i. 575. 
Specimens gathered by Mr. C. G. Pringle on the Sierra Madre 
are peculiar in the snowy whiteness of the under surface of the 
leaves, which is clothed with thick pubescence. 
6 Geiger, Ann. Chem. und Pharm. xiv. 206.— A. J. Frey, Am. 
Jour. Pharm. 1878, 390. 
6 Schoepf, Mat. Med. Amer. 14.—J. M. Walker, An Experi- 
mental Inquiry into the similarity in virtue between the Cornus florida 
and sericea, and the Cinchona officinalis of Linneus. — Barton, Coll. 
ed. 3, i. 12, 47; .17.— W. P. C. Barton, Afed. Bot. i. 43, t. 3. — 
Bigelow, Jed. Bot. ii. 73, t. 28.— Rafinesque, Med. Fl. i. 131, t. 
28.— Lindley, Fl. Med. 81.— A. Richard, Hist. Mat. MJéd. iii. 
554. — Griffith, Med. Bot. 347, f. 164.— Carson, Med. Bot. i. 50, 
t. 42.— Porcher, Resources of Southern Fields and Forests, 59.— 
Bentley & Trimen, Med. Pl. ii. 136, t. 136. — Johnson, Man. Med. 
Bot. N. Am. 158, t. 5.— U. S. Dispens. ed. 16, 508. 
7 Millspaugh, Am. Med. Pl. in Homeopathic Remedies, i. 71, 
t. 71. 
