42 WEST AMERICAN OAKS. 



Habitat. From the Umpqua Valley in Oregon to the Santa Lucia Mountains in 

 California, chiefly along the coast and in the redwood region, also extending to the Sierra 

 Nevada in the more northerly localities : most frequent and of largest development along 

 streams and in mountain ravines in moist rich soils ; but common on dry and sterile hill- 

 tops, in the bushy form. 



Remarks. This is the most remarkable of all North American oaks ; to the botanist 

 especially, a tree of surpassing interest. Nuttall, in the Sylva, speaks of it as " Scarcely 

 a true oak, but congeneric with species in the Himalaya Mountains, in India." Its erect 

 and densely flowered staminate aments are those of the chestnut rather than of the oak; 

 and the soft-prickly clothing of the cup is another point of contact with Castanea; besides 

 the nut itself, while it does net appear to be " more convex on one side," as Nuttall 

 seemed to think, is most certainly a little triangular even at full maturity, when viewed 

 from above; and the shell of the nut is much thicker and harder than in any other 

 species of either oak or chestnut of our continent at least. In view of all these consider- 

 ations, there are better grounds than our American botanists of later years have seen, for 

 the genus Pasania of CErsted. As far as our California species goes, Castanopsis is even 

 a less valid genus than Pasania. In our opinion it must, in all reason, be referred to 

 Castanea by those whose estimate of generic characters places in Quercus the tree here 

 described. 



Whenever this species attains the dimensions of a tree, whether small or great, it is, 

 as Dr. Kellogg has remarked, the most regular and symmetrical of oaks ; and it is cer- 

 tainly among the most beautiful of Califomian forest trees. The large proportion of tannin 

 which its bark contains renders it one of the most useful of our trees ; and the many 

 cargoes of this bark which are annually landed in San Francisco from the northern 

 coast counties may make botanists apprehensive of a final extinction of the tree. Among 

 the woodmen it is commonly known as the Tan Bark Oak. Chestnut Oak is a name 

 which we suspect may have been given it by the botanists. Mr. Bolander learned that 

 " Its wood is absolutely useless ; it is very coarse-grained, and, like the redwood, wet as a 

 sponge when cut ; it is extremely perishable. At Mendocino City log-men call it Water 

 Oak." 



The original figure in Hooker's Icones is very bad, conveying no idea at all of the 

 remarkable cup. That in Nuttall's Sylva is a poor reproduction of the same. These 

 misleading representations were what led Dr. Torrey to suppose that, in his Q. echinacea, 

 he had a wholly distinct and new species. I have never seen the scales or bristles of the 

 cup so much deflexed as his figure would indicate. Dr. Kellogg'S drawing, which our 

 engraver has faithfully reproduced in Plate XXIV, is a perfect representation of the cups 

 as they appear in that low and bushy form which may possibly be a distinct species, and 

 which Mr. Robert Brown has pronounced such, it being doubtless his Q. echinoides. 



