104 SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. SALICACEZ, 
sometimes lighter brown and slightly tinged with orange-color, and is deeply divided into broad flat 
connected ridges, their surface separating into thick plate-like scales. The branchlets are slender, very 
brittle at the base, rather bright reddish brown or in the desert region of New Mexico and Arizona pale 
orange-color, and glabrous or often coated at first with pale pubescence or snowy tomentum which soon 
disappears. The winter-buds are acute and about a sixteenth of an inch long, and in color resemble the 
branches. The leaves are involute in the bud, lanceolate, gradually narrowed above the middle into 
long tapering and usually curved tips, and below into a wedge-shaped or somewhat rounded base, and 
serrate with minute reflexed remote teeth ; when they unfold they are coated, especially on the lower 
surface, with pale pubescence, and at maturity are thin, bright light green, rather lustrous, obscurely 
reticulate-venulose, and glabrous, or often pubescent on the under side of the midribs and arcuate veins 
and on the short slender petioles; they are from three to six inches long and from one eighth to 
three quarters of an inch wide, varying greatly in size and outline on different individuals, and are fre- 
quently conspicuously scythe-shaped,' especially on trees growing in the northeastern states ; the first pair 
are ovate, acute, coated with pale silky hairs, and disappear when less than an inch in length. The 
stipules are semicordate, acuminate, foliaceous, and persistent, or ovoid, minute, and deciduous. Late 
in the autumn the leaves turn light yellow before falling, but often, especially in the south, fall without 
change of color. The aments, which appear from the first of February in southern Arizona to the 
middle of June in northern New England, are borne on short leafy branches often prolonged by one of 
the upper axillary buds, and are narrowly cylindrical and from one to three inches in length; their 
scales are remotely subverticillate, short, rounded at the apex, yellow, and coated on the inner surface 
with pale hairs. The stamens vary from three to five in number, with free filaments hairy toward the 
base. The ovary is ovate, glabrous, and gradually narrowed above the middle to the apex, which is 
crowned with nearly sessile thick slightly emarginate stigmatic lobes. Before the fruit ripens the scales 
fall from the pistillate aments, which, when fully grown, vary from an inch and a half to three inches in 
length. The capsule is ovate, conical, short-stalked, glabrous, about an eighth of an inch long, and 
hight reddish brown. 
Salix nigra inhabits the banks of streams and lakes, over which it often extends its trunks and 
branches, and is distributed from southern New Brunswick and the northern shores of Lakes Huron ° 
and Superior’ southward to southern Florida, westward to eastern Dakota,? Nebraska,* Kansas,° and the 
Indian Territory, and through western Texas,° southern New Mexico and Arizona, and southward into 
Mexico, and along the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada northward to the valley of the Sacramento 
River and to the shores of Clear Lake at the eastern base of the Coast Range in Colusa County, Cali- 
fornia. It is the largest and most conspicuous native Willow of eastern North America, and is most 
abundant in the basin of the Mississippi River, growing probably to its greatest size in southern 
Indiana and [llinois and in the valley of the lower Colorado River in Texas. It is the common arbores- 
cent Willow on the banks of streams in western Texas,’ and southern New Mexico and Arizona, where 
it frequently attains a height of forty feet and forms a trunk four feet in diameter, and a broad 
round-topped symmetrical head. The Black Willow apparently does not grow in any part of the 
northern interior region of the continent, and is comparatively rare in California. 
The wood of Salix migra is light, soft, weak, and close-grained, checking badly in drying; it 
? Salix nigra, var. falcata, Torrey, Fl. N. Y. ii. 209 (1843). — vetter, J. c. 626.— Darlington, Fi. Cestr. ed. 2, 560. — Barratt, 
Carey, Gray’s Man. 429.— Darlington, Fl. Cestr. ed. 3, 280.— Sal. Amer. No. 21. 
Bebb, Gray’s Man. ed. 6, 481. — Dippel, Handb. Laubholzk. ii. 226, ? Provancher, Flore Canadienne, ii. 529.— Macoun, Cat. Can. 
f. 112. Pi. 451. 
Salix falcata, Pursh, Fl. Am. Sept. ii. 614 (1814). — Poiret, * Williams, Bull. No. 43, South Dakota Agric. Coll. 107. 
Lamarck Dict. Suppl. v. 70.— Sprengel, Syst. i. 107. — Forbes, * Bessey, Rep. Nebraska State Board Agric. 1894, 103. 
Salict. Woburn. 279. — Trautvetter, Mém. Sav. Etr. Acad. Sci. ° Mason, Eighth Bienn. Rep. State Board Agric. Kansas, 272. 
St. Pétersbourg, iii. 613. — Hooker, Fl. Bor.-Am. ii. 149. —Dietrich, ® Bebb, Garden and Forest, viii. 363. 
Syn. v. 420. * Havard, Proc. U. S. Nat. Mus. viii. 502. 
Salix Purshiana, A. F. Sprengel, Syst. v. 608 (1828). — Traut- 
