72 



> 



SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA, cupulifer e. 



aments from an inch and a balf to two inches long, the pistillate on short peduncles coated with thick 

 hoary tomentum. The calyx of the staminate flower is pale yellow and divided into nearly triangular 

 segments much shorter than the from five to seven stamens, which are composed of short slender 



filaments and broad oblong emarginate glabrous yellow anthers. The scales of the pistillate flowers 

 are coated with pale tomentum, and theu^ stigmas are dull red. The acorns are sessile or subsessile and 

 usually soHtary ; the nut is ovate, obovate or oval, acute or rounded and sometimes depressed at the 

 broad apex, which is usually clothed with a narrow ring of pale pubescence, from half an inch to an 

 inch in length and from three eighths to three fifths of an inch in width j the cup, which incloses only 



the base of the nut, is saucer-shaped, thin and shallow, bright reddish brown and pubescent on the inner 

 surface, and covered on the outer with regularly and closely imbricated ovate bright red-brown scales 

 clothed with hoary pubescence except at their acute or rounded appressed tips. 



Quercus hi^eviloha inhabits the rich Hmestone prairie region of central Alabama and Mississippi,^ 

 finding its most eastern home in the valley of the Mulberry Fork of the Tombigbee River in Blount 

 County, Alabama.^ It reappears on the banks of the Red River at Shreveport,^ and in Texas ranges from 

 the neighborhood of the city of Dallas westward to the central part of the state and southward near 

 streams flowing into the Gulf of Mexico to the mountains of Nuevo Leon in the vicinity of Monterey.* 

 East of the Mississippi River, where it attains its largest size, it grows on dry prairies with the Post Oak, 

 the Black Jack, the White Oak, and the Nutmeg Hickory, or in low ground subject to overflow, where 

 it is scattered through the forests of the Swamp Chestnut Oak, the Willow Oak, and the Texas Oak ; in 

 Texas, where it grows on the dry hmestone banks of streams and rocky bluffs,^ it is usually asso- 

 ciated with the Post Oak, the Texas Oak, the Cedar Elm, and the western Juniper. 



The wood of Quercus hreviloha grown in Texas is very heavy, hard, and strong, although brittle 

 and inchned to check in drying. It is brown, with thick lighter colored sapwood, and contains numerous 

 conspicuous medullary rays and bands of large open ducts marking the layers of annual growth. The 

 specific gravity of the absolute dry wood is 0.9507, a cubic foot weighing 59.29 pounds. When grown 

 in Alabama and Mississippi it is said to equal the best white oak and to be used for the same purposes 

 as that wood ; it is especially valued for the pins in cotton-gins and in the manufacture of spools, 

 baskets, and wagon-hubs. 



Quercus hreviloha was discovered in western Texas in 1850 by Dr. J. M. Bigelow,^ one of the 

 botanists of the Mexican Boundary Survey ; in September, 1859, it was found near Clinton, in Wilcox 

 County, Alabama, by Mr. S. B. Buckley,'^ who saw it in October of the same year at Shreveport, 

 Louisiana, and, finding it afterward in Texas, first distinguished the specific characters of this useful 

 and beautiful tree. 



hreviloha 



discovered 



only near Columbus, and in the neighborliood of Mhoons Valley, 1887, by C. S. Sargent. 



in the centre of the state. 



2 Mohr, Garden and Forest, vi. 372. 



^ Reverchon, Garden and Forest, vi. 524. 

 6 See i. 88. 



8 Buckley, Proc. Phil. Acad. 1881, 121. ' See iii. 3. 



