cupuLiFERiE. 8ILVA OF NORTH AMERICA, 



107 



in 1875, Quercus chrysoUpis, var. Palmeri^ is less often a tree than a shrub, with stems usually 

 fifteen or twenty feet tall, forming on low hills or on the plateau at the foot of the mountains laro-e 

 nearly unpenetrable thickets. It has rigid branches, rigid coriaceous oblong or semiorbicular and 

 mostly spinose-dentate leaves, pistillate flowers sometimes borne on long slender peduncles sub- 

 sessile or pedunculate fruit, with ovate acute nuts from an inch to an inch and a half lono- and from 



& 



one third to two thirds of an inch wide, clothed on the inner surface of the shell with thick or thin 

 pale tomentum, abortive ovules generally scattered on the side of the seed, and purple separable 

 cotyledons. 



More valuable as a timber-tree than the other Oaks of central California, Querelas chrysoleiyh" 

 jDroduces heavy very strong hard tough and close-grained wood ; it is light brown, with thick rather 

 darker colored sapwood, and contains many small open ducts arranged in wide bands parallel to the 

 broad conspicuous medullary rays. The specific gravity of the absolutely dry wood is 0.S493, a cubic 

 foot weighing 52.93 pounds. Although difficult to cut and work, it is used in the manufacture of 

 agricultural implements and wagons. 



Quercus chrysolepis was discovered by the German collector Karl Theodore Hartweg on the 

 mountains near Monterey in 1846,^ and was probably first noticed in New Mexico by Professor Edward 

 L. Greene. The most beautiful of the California Oaks as it grows in the sheltered valleys of the coast 

 ranges or on the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, Quercus chrysole^ns is surpassed in majestic dignity 

 and massive strength by no other American species except the Live Oak of the south Atlantic and Gulf 

 states. 



dedicated to him by Asa Gray, and his name, by its association Mary K. Curr 



with many species of plants, is inseparably connected with the bot- Am. Oaks, 46. 



146 ri885y — Greene. West 



any of southwestern North America, which he has labored long and Quercus Palmeri, Engelmann, Brewer ^ Watson Bot. Cal. ii. 97 



faithfully to make known. 



(1880). — Greene, I. c. pt. ii. 55, t. 25. 



Quercm chrysolepis, subspec. Palmeri, Engelmann, Trans. St. - In Kern County, California, Quercus chrysolepis is called the 



Louis Acad. iii. 393 (1877). 



Hickory Oak. 



Quercus Dunnii, Kellogg, Pacific Rural Press, June 7, 1879. — ^ See Jour. Hort. Soc. London, ii. 124. 



