68 



SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. cupulifer^. 



length, the pistillate in few-flowered spikes on short peduncles coated, like the involucral scales, with 

 dense pale rufous tomentum. The calyx of the staminate flower is light yellow-green, pilose with long 

 pale hairs, and divided into from four to seven acute lobes ; the stamens are composed of slender 

 filaments and broad oblong slightly emarginate yeUow glabrous anthers. The stigmas are dark red. 

 The fruit is soHtary or in pairs, and is sessile or subsessile or borne on a short stout puberulous peduncle 

 marked with pale lenticels and rarely half an inch in length ; the nut is oval or ovate, with a broad 

 base and an acute rounded or occasionally truncate apex, which is clothed with a narrow ring of rusty 

 pubescence ; it is sometimes pilose nearly to the middle, and is bright brown, rather lustrous, from an 

 inch to an inch and a haK in length and from three quarters of an inch to nearly an inch and a quarter 

 in width, and contains a sweet seed ; the cup, which incloses about a third of the nut, is thick, 

 cup-shaped, and often broad and flat on the bottom, reddish brown and pubescent within, and hoary- 

 tomentose on the outer surface, which is covered with regularly imbricated large ovate acute free scales 

 rounded and much thickened on the back, with thin reddish margins and short tips which sometimes 

 form a rigid fringe-like border to the rim of the cup. 



Quercus Mlchaitxii inhabits the borders of streams, low swamps, and bottom-lands often covered 

 with water, and is distributed from the neighborhood of Wilmington, Delaware, southward through the 



coast and middle districts to northern Florida, through the Gulf states to the valley of the Trinity 

 Kiver in Texas, and through Arkansas and southeastern Missouri to central Tennessee and Kentucky 



and the valley of the lower Wabash River in Illinois and Indiana.^ 



Quercus Mlchaitxii is one of the most important timber-trees of eastern North America, and the 

 largest and most valuable White Oak of the southeastern states. The wood is heavy, hard, very strong 

 and tough, close-grained, very durable in contact with the soil, and easily spht. It is light brown, with 

 thin darker colored sapwood, and contains broad conspicuous medullary rays and bands of large open 

 ducts marking the layers of annual growth. The specific gravity of the absolutely dry wood is 0.8039, 

 a cubic foot weighing 50.10 pounds. It is largely used in all kinds of construction, for agricultural 

 implements and wheels, in cooperage, for fences and for fuel, and in the manufacture of strong baskets, 

 for which purpose, as it can be so easily split into thin plates, it is excelled by the wood of no other 

 American tree. The seeds are sweeter than those of the other Oaks of eastern North America, and are 

 eaten by domestic animals, and by children and negroes. 



Quercus Michauxii is the most beautiful of the Chestnut Oaks and one of the most striking and 

 imposing of the trees of eastern North America, always conspicuous from the silvery white bark of the 

 tall massive trunk and the broad crown of large and finely colored foliage. First described in 1731 in 

 The Natural History of Carolina ^ by Mark Catesby, who confounded it with what has usually been 

 considered the Chestnut Oak of Plukenet, the Quercus Prinus of Linnseus, it was long considered a 

 variety of that tree. 



Nat Mils, v. 81 : xvii 



foliis 



foliis 



make 



Plukenet). 



this certain 



Michaux (HisL Chmes Am.) considered that Plukenet's Quercus 



