90 SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. BIGNONIACE. 
nearly two inches and a horizontal diameter of two inches and a half. The filaments, which are marked 
near the base with a few oblong purple spots, are slightly exserted, and rather longer than the slender 
glabrous style. The fruit is eight to twenty inches long and one half to three quarters of an inch in 
diameter in the middle, with a thick wall which toward spring splits into two concave valves; the 
partition is thickened in the middle and nearly triangular in section. The seed is an inch long and a 
third of an inch broad, with a light brown coat, and wings which are rounded at the ends and termimate 
in a fringe of rather short hairs. 
Catalpa speciosa inhabits the borders of streams and ponds and fertile often inundated bottom- 
lands, and is distributed from the valley of the Vermillion River in Illimois through southern Illinois 
and Indiana, western Kentucky and Tennessee, southeastern Missouri and northeastern Arkansas ; 
through cultivation it has become naturalized near habitations in southern Arkansas, western Louisiana, 
and eastern Texas. In southern Illinois and Indiana, where it probably grew to its largest size, the 
Western Catalpa was formerly extremely abundant. 
The wood of Catalpa speciosa is light, soft, not strong, coarse-grained, and very durable in con- 
tact with the soil. 
clearly mark the layers of annual growth, and is light brown, with thin nearly white sapwood com- 
It contains numerous obscure medullary rays and bands of large open ducts, which 
posed of one or two layers of annual growth. The specific gravity of the absolutely dry wood is 
0.4165, a cubic foot weighing 25.96 pounds. 
and occasionally for furniture and the interior finish of houses. 
Long confounded with the Catalpa of the Atlantic and eastern Gulf states, Catalpa speciosa was 
first distinguished by Dr. J. A. Warder,’ who published the earliest account of it in 1853.2 Twenty 
years later its rapid growth,‘ its hardiness, and the remarkable durability of its wood drew the attention 
It is largely used for railway ties, fence-posts, and rails, 
of the public to the value of the Western Catalpa for planting on the prairies, where, chiefly through 
the efforts of E. E. Barney *® and Robert Douglas,’ many plantations have been made with this tree. 
1 The trunks of the Catalpa-trees killed by the sinking and sub- 
sequent submersion of a large tract of land near New Madrid, Mis- 
souri, which followed the earthquake of August, 1811, were stand- 
ing and perfectly sound sixty-seven years later, although all their 
companions in the forest had disappeared long before. Undecayed 
fence-posts believed to have been continuously in the ground for 
more than half a century demonstrate, too, the remarkable dura- 
(See E. E. Barney, Addi- 
tional Facts and Information in Relation to the Catalpa-tree, 5.) 
2 John Aston Warder (1812-1883), of a family of the Society 
of Friends, was born in the neighborhood of Philadelphia, where 
bility of the wood of Catalpa speciosa. 
he had his schooling, and with his parents moved in 1830 to Spring- 
field, Ohio. He was graduated in 1836 from the Jefferson Medical 
College of Philadelphia, and established himself as a physician in 
Cincinnati. In 1855 he gave up the practice of medicine, and 
settled on a farm in North Bend, Ohio, which was his home during 
the remainder of his life, passed in the study and practice of hor- 
ticulture and forestry. In 1873 Dr. Warder was appointed United 
States Commissioner to the International Exhibition at Vienna, and 
his report on the exhibits in the Forestry Department is an inter- 
esting contribution to the knowledge of forestry. The last years 
of Dr. Warder’s life were devoted to creating a public interest in 
American forests and forest-planting ; and in 1875 he took the 
principal part in organizing the American Forestry Association, 
which held its first meeting in Philadelphia the following year. 
Among Dr. Warder’s numerous contributions to the literature of 
horticulture and forestry are a Manual on Hedges and Evergreens, 
published in 1858 ; American Pomology : Apples, published in 1867, 
in which are included the results of many years of careful observa- 
tion; The Woody Plants of Ohio, published in 1882; and many 
valuable papers in Z'he American Journal of Forestry, and other 
technical periodicals. 
8 Western Horticultural Review, iii. 533. 
4 Young plants of Catalpa speciosa in good soil sometimes in- 
crease in diameter of the trunk with great rapidity, and specimens 
with three or four layers of annual growth each nearly an inch in 
thickness are not uncommon. In one of these quickly grown speci- 
mens Professor C. R. Barnes (Bot. Gazette, ix. 74, f. 4) found the lay- 
ers of annual growth separated by thin well-defined plates of cork. 
After the first few years the growth of Catalpa speciosa in the 
forest is not particularly rapid. Of the two log specimens in the 
Jesup Collection of North American Woods in the American Mu- 
seum of Natural History in New York, collected in southeastern 
Missouri, one is 374 inches in diameter inside the bark, with 178 
layers of annual growth, and the other is 224 inches in diameter, 
with 105 layers of annual growth. 
5 Eliam Eliakim Barney (1807-1880) was born in Henderson 
near Sackett’s Harbor, New York, and in 1831 was graduated from 
Union College at Schenectady. For many years a teacher, he af- 
terwards became interested in a saw-mill in Dayton, Ohio, where 
later he established the Barney & Smith Car Company, of which 
he was president until his death. Attracted by the beauty of the 
Catalpas shading the streets of Dayton, he became interested in 
the tree, and in 1878 published for free distribution two tracts, in 
which he had gathered all the available information concerning it, 
entitled Facts and Information in relation to the Catalpa-tree (Ca- 
talpa bignonioides), its Value, and importance of its extensive cultiva- 
tion in groves, and Additional Facts and Information in relation to the 
Catalpa-tree (Catalpa bignonioides) and its variety ? speciosa. 
6 Robert Douglas was born in Gateshead near Halifax in Eng- 
