130 



SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 



CUPULIFER^ 



gradually dark vinous red or brown, or often change color but slightly before falling. The stipules are 

 oblong-obovate, Kght brown, thin and scarious, from one half to three quarters of an inch long, and 

 caducous. The flowers appear from the middle of March in Texas to the beginning of May in Illinois, 

 the staminate borne in slender shghtly pubescent aments from two to three inches in length, the pistdlate 

 on short peduncles clothed with hoary tomentum. The calyx of the staminate flower is thin and 

 scarious, viUous on the outer surface, and divided into four or five acute laciniately cut segments shorter 

 than the stamens, which are usually four in number, with oblong shghtly emargiuate glabrous yellow 

 anthers. The involucral scales of the pistillate flower are brown tinged with red and pubescent, and the 

 stigmas are recurved and often bright red. The fruit, which ripens at the end of the second summer, 

 is sessile or raised on a short peduncle occasionally half an inch long, and is usually solitary ; the nut is 

 oval, abruptly narrowed and rounded at the base, full and rounded or gradually or abruptly narrowed 

 and rounded at the apex, puberulous, light reddish brown and sometimes conspicuously striate with 

 broad longitudinal dark bands, and from half an inch to an inch and a half in length ; the cup, which 

 embraces from one third to one half of the nut, is turbinate or deeply cup-shaped, light reddish brown 

 and puberulous within, and covered by thin closely imbricated ovate light brown scales rounded at the 

 narrow ends and coated, except on the red-brown margins, with thick hoary tomentum. 



Quercus Texana is distributed from northeastern Iowa ^ and central Illinois, through southern Illi- 

 nois and Indiana and western Kentucky and Tennessee, to the valley of the Appalachicola Kiver in 

 Florida, and through southern Missouri, Arkansas," and Louisiana to the Limpio Mountains in western 

 Texas.^ On the low river bottom-lands of the Mississippi basin, growing with the Swamp White Oak, 

 the Red Maple, the Sour Gum, the Liquidambar, the Pin Oak, and the Swamp Cottonwood, it attains its 

 largest size and is exceedingly common, especially in western Mississippi, southern Arkansas, and eastern 

 Texas, where it frequently forms a great part of the lowland forest. It is less abundant in the southern 

 portions of the eastern Gulf states and probably does not reach the coast. In western Texas it often 

 grows on low limestone hills with the Post Oak and the Western Cedar, and is then a small tree or occa- 

 sionally a shrub, or becomes a larger tree on the moister bottom-lands in the neighborhood of streams. 



The wood of a small specimen of Quercus Texana grown on the hmestone hills near Austin, 

 Texas, is heavy, hard, and close-grained, light reddish brown, with few conspicuous medullary rays and 

 bands of small ducts marking the layers of annual growth. The specific gravity of the absolutely dry 

 wood is 0.9080, a cubic foot weighing 56.59 pounds. This determination probably does not represent 

 the value of the wood of Quercus Texana from the Mississippi valley, as lumbermen and manufacturers 

 consider it more valuable than that of the eastern Red Oak, with which it has always been confounded. 



Quercus Texana was discovered near the mouth of the Pecos River in Texas by the botanists of the 

 United States and Mexican Boundary Commission in 1850. As a street tree it is frequently planted in 

 Carrollton, a suburb of New Orleans, where it also grows spontaneously. 



Quercus Texana, which sometimes grows to a greater height than any other American Oak,^ may 



4 



1 Quercus Texana was discovered near Waterloo, Iowa, by Pro- and grandeur of these trees, would, I fear, fail of credibility; yet. 



fessor A. S. Hitchcock in 1889. 



2 Harvey, Am. Jour. Forestry, i. 454 {Quercus ruhra). 

 8 Havard, P7-oc. U. S. Nat. Mus. viii. 505. 



I think I can assert, that many of the black oaks measured eight, 

 nine, ten, and eleven feet diameter five feet above the ground, as 

 we measured several that were above thirty feet girt, and from 



4 There is still much to learn with regard to the distribution hence they ascend perfectly strait, with a gradual taper, forty or 



of this tree. The fact that it is so common and grows with such fifty feet to the limbs ; but, below five or six feet, these trunks 



luxuriance at the mouth of the White River in Indiana would indi- would measure a third more in circumference, on account of the 



cate that it might be looked for much farther north than it is now projecting jambs, or supports, which are more or less, according to 



known to grow in Indiana, and that it probably extends into Ohio. the number of horizontal roots that they arise from." I have 



Possibly, as suggested by Ridgway {Bot. Gazette, viii. 349, as Qxier- found, however, no evidence except Bartram's description of the 



cus rubra), it was this tree which was found by William Bartram enlarged and buttressed bases of these trees to prove that Quercus 



near Little Ptiver in Georgia, and which, without description, he Texana grows in any of the Atlantic states, 

 called Quercus tinctoria. "To keep within the bounds," he says 



(^Travels, 37), "of truth and reality in describing the magnitude (( 



Nat. Mus 



uercus 



