LOCUST, COFFEE-BEAN AND RED-BUD 199 



seed-bearing. The pods are large and flattened, bright brown or 

 purphsh in color when mature, and are always more or less curved 

 and twisted as they contract in drying during the autumn. They 

 are from 5 to 18 inches long and about 1^ Inches wide. The space 

 between the seeds is filled with a sweet succulent pulp, hence the 

 name honey shucks, and the pods do not split open when the seeds 

 are ripe. The wood is much like that of the black locust and is 

 used for similar purposes. 



The water locust is a much smaller tree, with leaves much like 

 those of the honey locust but with somewhat larger leaflets, which 

 are thicker and a darker green. The pods, however, are not much 

 longer than wide with only one or two seeds and without a succu- 

 lent pulp. The water locust is an inhabitant of river bottoms and 

 swamps and attains its maximum size in the bottom swamps and 

 along stream banks in Louisiana and Arkansas. 



No representatives of the honey locust can be recognized with 

 certainty in either the Upper Cretaceous or the Eocene, although 

 there are a number of leguminous leaflets found in the rocks of 

 both of these periods that might well represent its ancestors, in 

 fact a genus called Gleditsiophyllum found in both the Upper 

 Cretaceous and the Eocene of North America is suggestively 

 like the honey locust. 



A supposed species is recorded from the Oligocene of Europe 

 and there are a number of undoubted Miocene species. Seven 

 or eight have been described, one occurring on the east coast of 

 Asia and the others all confined to Europe, where they are known 

 from Greece and Hungary to France. They are especially abun- 

 dant in the Miocene woods of Switzerland in the days before the 

 formation of the Alps had been completed. Pliocene records are 

 wanting in both this country and Europe. The modem species 

 appears in the early Pleistocene of Kentucky and an extinct species 

 is recorded from the Interglacial deposits of the Don Valley in 

 Ontario. 



