EUPHORBiACE^. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 



25 



DRYPETES KEYENSIS. 



White Wood. 



Calyx 5-lobed ; stamens 8 ; ovary 1-celled, Fruit oblong ; exocarp thick and 

 mealy ; nutlet thick-walled. 



Keyensis 



N. 



Drypetes glauca, NuttaU, Sylva, ii. 68 (not Vahl) Am. 10th Census U. S. ix. 121 (not MueUer Arg.) 



(1849). — Chapman, Fl 410. 



(1884) . 



A tree^ occasionally thirty to forty feet in height, with a trunk sometimes a foot in diameter, and 

 stout usually erect branches which form an oblong round-topped head. The bark of the trunk is half 

 an inch thick, smooth, milky white^ and often marked with large irregular gray or pale brown blotches. 

 The branchlets, when they first appear, are light green tinged with red, and covered with pale scattered 

 caducous hairs, and in their first winter are stout, ashy gray, and roughened with numerous elevated 

 circular pale lenticels, and later with large prominent orbicular leaf-scars in which appear three conspic- 

 uous fibro-vascular bundle-scars. The buds are minute, obtuse, partly immersed in the bark, and 

 coated with brown resin* The leaves are entire, oval, or oblong, often more or less falcate, acute, 

 acuminate, rounded or rarely emarginate at the apex, and rounded or wedge-shaped at the base, which 

 is sometimes rounded on one side and gradually parrowed on the other ; when they unfold they are 

 thin and membranaceous, hght green or green tinged with red, and pilose with scattered pale hairs ; and 

 at maturity they are thick and coriaceous, dark green and lustrous, rather paler on the lower than on 

 the upper surface, three to five inches long, and one to two inches wide, with broad thick pale midribs 

 raised and rounded on the upper side, and obscure primary veins arcuate and united near the thick 

 revolute cartilaginous margins and connected by conspicuous coarsely reticulated veinlets ; they are 

 borne on stout yellow midribs rounded below, grooved above, and half an inch in length, and in Florida 

 appear in early spring and fall during their second year. The stipules are nearly triangular, and rather 

 less than a sixteenth of an inch long, and disappear before the leaves are half grown. The flowers open 

 in early spring in the axils of leaves of the previous year, the males in many-flowered clusters, the 

 females usually solitary or occasionally in two or three-flowered clusters, on pedicels rather shorter than 

 the petioleso The caljrx is yellow-green, hirsute on the outer surface, and about a sixteenth of an inch 

 long, and is divided nearly to the base into five ovate acute boat-shaped lobes deciduous from the fruit. 

 In the male flower, which shows no trace of a pistil, there are about eight stamens inserted on the 

 borders of the slightly lobed tomentose pulvinate concave disk ; the filaments are unequal in length and 

 rather longer than the lobes of the calyx and a little longer than the broadly ovate emarginate anthers, 

 which are nearly as broad as they are long, pilose and introrse, with broad ovate acute connectives. 

 The ovary of the female flower, which is sessile on a broad slightly lobed disk, is hirsute, one-celled, 

 and crowned with the broad sessile or slightly stalked oblique pulvinate stigma. The fruit ripens in 

 the autumn, and is ovoid, an inch long, and ivory white, with thick dry mealy flesh closely investing the 

 lio-ht brown nutlet, which is narrowed at the base into a long point, and has bony walls an eighth of an 

 inch in thickness and penetrated longitudinally by large fibro-vascular bundle channels j it is borne 

 on a stout erect stalk, much enlarged at the apex, and a third of an inch in length, from which it 

 separates in falling. The seed is oblong, rounded at both ends, nearly half an inch long, and covered 

 with a thin membranaceous light brown coat marked with conspicuous veins radiating from the small 



hilum. 



