SAPOTACE. 
SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 
171 
BUMELIA LANUGINOSA. 
Gum Elastic. 
Chittim Wood. 
Leaves oblong-obovate to cuneate-obovate, silky-pubescent on the lower surface. 
Bumelia lanuginosa, Persoon, Syn. i. 237 (1805). — Pursh, 
Fl. Am. Sept. i. 155. — Nuttall, Gen. i. 185. — Roemer 
& Schultes, Syst. iv. 497. — Elliott, Sk. i. 288. — Don, Gen. 
Syst. iv. 30.— A. de Candolle, Prodr. viii. 190. — Chap- 
man, FV. 275. — Gray, Syn. Fl. N. Am. ii. 68. — Sargent, 
Forest Trees N. Am. 10th Census U. S. ix. 102. — Wat- 
son & Coulter, Gray’s Man. ed. 6, 333. — Coulter, Contrib. 
U. S. Nat. Herb. ii. 256 (Man. Pl. W. Texas). 
? Sideroxylon tenax, Walter, F7. Car. 100 (not Linnzus) 
(1788). 
Sideroxylon lanuginosum, Michaux, F?. Bor.-Am. i. 122 
Chrysophyllum Ludovicianum, Rafinesque, Fl. Ludovic. 
53 (1817). 
? Bumelia . oblongifolia, Nuttall, Gen. i. 135 (1818) ; 
Sylva, iii. 33. — Sprengel, Syst. i. 664.— Don, Gen. 
Syst. iv. 30.— Loudon, Arb. Brit. ii. 1194. — Dietrich, 
Syn. i. 621.— A. de Candolle, Prodr. viii. 190. 
Bumelia arachnoidea, Rafinesque, New 7. iii. 28 (1836). 
Bumelia tomentosa, A. de Candolle, Prodr. viii. 190 
(1844). 
Bumelia ferruginea, Nuttall, Sylva, iii. 34 (1849). 
Bumelia arborea, Buckley, Proc. Phil. Acad. 1861, 461. 
(1803). — Du Mont de Courset, Bot. Cult. ed. 2, iii. 302. 
A tree, sometimes fifty or sixty feet in height, with a tall straight trunk occasionally three feet in 
diameter, short stout tough rigid branches, unarmed or armed with stout rigid straight or slightly 
curved spines which frequently develop into spinescent leafy lateral branches, and slender often some- 
what zigzag branchlets, forming a narrow oblong round-topped head; or much smaller in the region 
east of the Mississippi River, where it rarely attaims the height of twenty feet. The bark of the 
trunk is half an inch thick, dark gray-brown and usually divided by deep reticulate fissures into 
narrow ridges which are broken into thick appressed scales. The branchlets, when they first appear, 
are coated with thick rufous or pale tomentum, and in their first winter vary in color from red-brown to 
ashy gray and are glabrous or nearly so, and marked with occasional minute lenticels and with the small 
semiorbicular leaf-scars which display two clusters of fibro-vascular bundle-scars. The winter-buds are 
obtuse, an eighth of an inch long, and covered with broadly ovate scales clothed with rufous tomentum. 
The leaves are oblong-obovate to cuneate-obovate, rounded and often apiculate at the apex and gradually 
narrowed at the base; when they unfold they are coated with pale or ferrugineous tomentum, which is 
thick on the lower and loose on the upper surface, and at maturity they are thin and firm, dark green 
and lustrous above, and covered below with loose dull and usually pale tomentum, which varies greatly 
in amount and sometimes almost disappears. They vary from an inch to two inches and a half in 
length and from one third to three quarters of an inch in width, and are borne on short slender hairy 
petioles; they fall irregularly during the winter. The flowers are produced in summer in sixteen to 
eighteen-flowered fascicles on hairy pedicels and are an eighth of an inch long. The calyx is ovate, 
with ovate rounded lobes, coated on the outer surface with pale or ferrugineous tomentum, and rather 
shorter than the tube of the corolla. The staminodia are ovate, acute, remotely and slightly denticulate, 
and as long as the lobes of the corolla, which are furnished with ovate acute appendages. The ovary is 
hirsute and abruptly contracted into a slender elongated style. The fruit is oblong or slightly obovate, 
half an inch long, and borne on slender drooping stalks; it ripens and falls in the autumn. 
Bumelia lanuginosa is distributed from southern Georgia and northern Florida to the shores of 
Mobile Bay, Alabama, and from southern Illmois and southern Missouri through Arkansas and Texas 
to the mountain slopes of Nuevo Leon. Nowhere common east of the Mississippi River, where it usually 
grows in dry and rather sandy soil, it is very abundant and reaches its largest size on the rich river- 
bottom lands of eastern Texas. 
