LOCUST, COFFEE-BEAN AND RED-BUD 203 



white of the opening dogwood and forming splashes of bloom in 

 the gray woods. In the latter half of March the traveller through 

 Virginia and the Carolinas can scarcely distinguish from the train 

 window between the blooming peaches and the red-buds of the door- 

 yards. 



Our Judas-tree grows naturally from the valley of the Delaware 

 and southern Ontario to Tampa Bay, northern Alabama, Mississippi 

 and Texas, and extends westward along the bottoms of the large 

 streams into the eastern border of the prairie states. It is said 

 that the blossoms are sometimes eaten, although I have never 

 observed this custom. In the days before the prevalence of ani- 

 line dyes the branches were sometimes used for giving wool a nan- 

 keen color. 



The members of this genus are too small for lumbering and the 

 wood has no special uses that I know of, consequently we are not 

 likely to be deprived of the striking beauty of the Judas-tree as 

 we probably should if the wood could be used for bobbins or lead 

 pencils or boxes. 



Fortunately in the case of the Judas-tree a considerable beginning 

 has been made in tracing its geological history, although the in- 

 evitable gaps in this history have not all been closed. The oldest 

 known forms come from the lower Eocene and all of these, three 

 in number, are North American, occurring in Tennessee, Mississippi, 

 Montana and Dakota — the last being in a region now one of 

 prairies and bad lands far removed from the habitat of any of the 

 existing forms and showing how the ancestral Judas-trees were 

 enabled to migrate across North America in the more humid days 

 that preceded the development of the prairie type of country. A 

 middle Eocene species occurs at Bournemouth on the south coast 

 of England and an upper Eocene form has recently been described, 

 associated with a large and warm climate flora, in Hesse, Germany. 

 By succeeding Ohgocene times the Judas-tree had appeared at 

 additional localities in Europe where a very characteristic form 

 is found in southeastern France in the lower Oligocene and a second 

 French species occurs at a somewhat later stage of the Oligocene. 



