SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 
132 SALICACER. 
by the broad sessile entire or emarginate spreading yellow stigmas. The capsule is elongated-cylindrical, 
gradually narrowed into a long thin beak and raised on a slender stalk, sometimes half an inch long, 
much longer than the persistent scarious slightly villous scale. 
Salix Bebbiana inhabits the borders of streams, swamps, and lakes, dry hillsides, open woods and 
forest margins, usually selecting moist rich soil. In British America, where it is one of the commonest 
and most generally distributed Willows, it ranges from the valley of the lower St. Lawrence River to 
the shores of Hudson’s Bay, the valley of the Mackenzie River within. the Arctic Circle, and the coast 
ranges of British Columbia, forming, in the region west of Hudson’s Bay, almost impenetrable thickets 
with twisted and often inclining stems twenty or thirty feet high.” Common in all the northern states, 
it ranges southward to Pennsylvania and westward to Minnesota, and is scattered through the Rocky 
Mountain region from western Idaho? and northern Montana to the Black Hills of Dakota,‘ and western 
Nebraska,’ and southward through Colorado, where as a low shrub it ascends to elevations of ten 
thousand feet above the sea, to northern Arizona.° 
The wood of Salix Bebbiana has not been examined scientifically. 
The specific name commemorates the labors of the most accomplished American salicologist, 
Michael Schuck Bebb.’ 
1 Provancher, Fl. Canadienne, ii. 530.—Macoun, Cat. Can. Pl. 
453. 
2 Richardson, Arctic Searching Exped. ii. 313. 
3 Holzinger, Contrib. U. S. Nat. Herb. iii. 251. 
4 Williams, Bull. No. 43 South Dakota Agric. College, 107. 
5 Bessey, Rep. Nebraska State Board Agric. 1894, 103. 
6 In September, 1895, Salix Bebbiana was found by J. W. Toumey 
and C. S. Sargent on the northern slopes of the San Francisco 
Mountains in Arizona at an elevation of eight thousand five hun- 
dred feet, forming in moist ground great shrubs with many spread- 
ing stems fifteen or twenty feet high. 
7 Michael Schuck Bebb (December 23, 1833-December 5, 1895) 
was born in Butler County in southwestern Ohio, where his grand- 
father, Edward Bebb, a Welshman, had been one of the first white 
settlers in the fertile Miami valley. His father was a teacher and 
then a successful lawyer in Hamilton, the county town to which the 
family removed in 1835, and in 1846 was elected governor of Ohio. 
The well-kept garden surrounding the Bebb mansion in Hamilton 
was stocked with flowering plants and fruit-trees, and here, while 
still a boy, the future botanist acquired his first knowledge of plants, 
and, without the aid of a text-book, learned with effort the rudi- 
ments of the science from a copy of Torrey’s report upon the Flora 
of the State of New York, which had been sent to his father with 
other New York State reports by a political friend. In 1850 the 
family moved to a large tract of land which Governor Bebb had 
purchased in the Rock River valley in northern Illinois, near the 
present town of Fountaindale. Mr. Bebb’s love of botany was then 
increased by the acquisition of a few more botanical books and by 
an acquaintance with Dr. George Vasey, which began five or six 
years later, and was still further stimulated by a visit to New Eng- 
land, where he met several men of science. During the War of 
Secession he was a clerk in the Pension Office in Washington, and 
then, returning to Illinois, purchased the paternal homestead at 
Fountaindale and devoted himself to botany and especially to the 
study of Willows. 
these plants which has ever been made in the United States was 
The largest and most complete collection of 
planted at this time by Mr. Bebb, but, unfortunately, was destroyed 
a few years ago, when he moved to Rockford, Illinois. Since the 
year 1874, when he described his first Willow in The American Nat- 
uralist, all the collections of Willows made in North America have 
been studied by him; he has described the California species in 
Brewer & Watson’s Botany of California, the southwestern species, 
gathered by Rothrock, in the sixth volume of Wheeler’s Report, 
the Colorado species in Coulter’s Manual of the Botany of the Rocky 
Mountain Region, and the species of the eastern states in the sixth 
edition of Gray’s Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States, 
and has contributed to botanical journals many papers upon the 
American species of the genus. (See Garden and Forest, viii. 510.) 
The specimens of Salix which are figured in this work have all 
been selected by Mr. Bebb, and I take this opportunity to acknow- 
ledge my great indebtedness for the advice and assistance which 
he has freely given me during the last fifteen years. 
EXPLANATION OF THE PLATE. 
Puate CCCCLXXVII. 
. A flowering branch of the staminate tree, natural size. 
. A capsule, enlarged. 
DONA AgE WH 
SALix BEBBIANA. 
A staminate flower with its scale, front view, enlarged. 
. A flowering branch of the pistillate tree, natural size. 
. A pistillate flower with its scale, front view, enlarged. 
. Scale of a pistillate flower, enlarged. 
- Portion of a fruiting branch, natural size. 
. A summer branch, natural size. 
. A winter branch, natural size. 
