X WEST AMERICAN OAKS. 



by synonj'in, as the Bibliography will show. The identification of the species, under the 

 current nomenclature has not been a difficult task ; but the actual limits of many of them 

 in nature, cannot yet be said to have been at all well established. The territor}' which 

 they inhabit is vast indeed. Leaving out of the reckoning Utah and Nevada, Montana 

 and Idaho as territorj' upon which oaks form but a very insignificant part of the vege- 

 tation, and are wholly absent from most parts of their area; New Mexico, Arizona, 

 California, Oregon and Washington have together an area of more than six hundred and 

 fifty thousand square miles, upon all parts of which area oaks are more or less abundant. 

 The wide domains of the Scandinavian Kingdom, the whole German Empire and France 

 combined are scarcely more extensive. But the region of the West American Oaks is 

 yet hardly half explored botanicall}- . There must be very much yet to be learned of 

 them in this wide field. The western botanists of half a century hence will think rightly 

 that we knew little about them. New species will yet be discovered. The limits of old 

 ones will be altered, here curtailed, and there extended. All this is simply inevitable. 

 Therefore we say the present work is merely tentative; and nothing which is here laid 

 down respecting the geographical or the phytographical limits of species, should be taken 

 for infallible certainty. 



The Oaks of Western, like those of Eastern America and of the Old World, are of 

 two quite different natural groups or subgenera. White Oaks and Black Oaks; and the 

 more obvious characteristics of each group are given in the body of this paper under the 

 headings so named. The White Oaks are, I suppose, the proper type of the genus 

 Quercus; but I have not considered it needful to follow that order in a treatise of this kind. 

 By reversing it, that noble Pacific Coast Black Oak which an eminent New York bota- 

 nist named in honor of Dr. Kellogg, appears first on these pages, as it may fitly do, and 

 is immediately succeeded by the one arboreal species of which Dr. Kellogg himself is the 

 author. 



Having dispensed myself from observing the conventional rule, I freely place last in 

 the series of White Oaks, and as if it were one of them, our one particular species which 

 a few eminent botanists have said should not be called an Oak at all. Quercus densijlora 

 is, indeed, almost as much a Chestnut as it is an Oak; but, as an Oak it is obviously of 

 that group in which it is here placed, rather than a Black Oak. 



The only Western deciduous Black Oak, Q. Kelloggii^ is much like the common Q. 

 rubra of the Atlantic Slope; so much like it that, when the first specimens, mere leaf- 

 bearing twigs without acorns, were received in European herbaria, they were pronounced 

 by high authorities to be only Q. rubra; but the acorns, when these came to be known, 

 were found to be of a very different character from those of the Eastern analogue; and the 

 validitj' of Q. Kelloggii as a species, is not likely to be henceforward called in question. 



