256. COTINUS AMERICANUS AMERICAN SMOKE-TREE. 25 



PHYSICAL PROPERTIES. Wood light, soft, with fine medullary rays, and 

 annual layers marked by several rows of rather small open ducts. It is of 

 a bright light-yellow color streaked with brown and greenish, and the thin 

 sap-wood is nearly pure white. Specific Gravity, 0.4382 ; Percentage of 

 Ash, 0.64; Relative Approximate Fuel Value, 0.4354; Weight of a Cubic 

 Foot in Pounds, 27.30. 



MEDICINAL PROPERTIES. - - These are said to be identical with those of 

 the allied Poison Ivy. 



GENUS COTINUS, ADANS. 



Leaves deciduous, simple, mostly petiolate, thinnish, obovate, oblong or oval, entire, 

 glabrous or nearly so. Flowers small, greenish-yellow, dioecious or polygamous, in large 

 loose terminal panicles with slender accrescent pedicels many of which are abortive and 

 become villous; calyx lobes persistent; petals twice as long as the sepals: stamens 5, 

 shorter than the petals ; ovary obovoid, compressed ; styles 3, lateral, spreading. Fruit 

 1 -seeded dry obliquely oblong compressed glabrous drupelets, conspicuously reticulated 

 and bearing the remnants of the styles on one side ; stone bony. The drupelets occur in 

 ample loose thyrsoid panicles with many plume-like abortive pedicels. 



The name is the ancient Greek name of the Wild Olive, transferred to this tree. 



Small trees of two species with aromatic milky juice, one a native of Europe and Asia 

 and the other of southwestern United States. 



256. COTINUS AMERICANUS, NUTT. 



AMERICAN SMOKE-TREE. CHITTAM-WOOD. 



Ger., AmerikaniscTier Rauclibaum. Fr., Sumac Cotinus Americain. Sp., 



Arbol Fumoso Americano. 



SPECIFIC CHARACTERS: Leaves oval to obovate, 4-6 in. long, thinish, mostly petiolate 

 but the lowermost of the season's growth subsessile, decurrent on the petioles, rounded or 

 emarginate at apex, entire, glabrous, dark green above, paler and pubescent on the mid- 

 ribs beneath. Flowers (April-May) % in. across greenish, in panicles 5-6 in. long. Fruit 

 drupelets about % in. long and produced sparingly among the plumose steril pedicels. 



A small tree, occasionally attaining the height of 30 or 35 ft. (10 m.), 

 with spreading top of few large branches and trunk 12-14 in. (0.33 m.) 

 in diameter, covered with an ash-gray bark roughened with many small 

 imbricated scales. 



HABITAT. One of the rarest and most locally distributed trees of North 

 America the Smoke-tree is found on limestone ridges in the vicinity of 

 Huntsville, Alabama, and the Cheat Mountains of eastern Tennessee, in the 

 valley of the Medina River in western Texas, and on the Ozark Mountains 

 in southwestern Missouri and southwestward into Oklahoma. It is prob- 

 ably more common in the last-mentioned locality than in any other. 



