MYRICACE^E 



163 



glabrous filament, or very rarely 2, with filaments united below the middle or nearly to the 

 apex; ovary short-stalked, ovoid, conic, acute, pubescent and gradually narrowed into 

 the elongated style, with entire or slightly emarginate short stigmas. Fruit ovoid, nar- 

 rowed above, light red-brown, pubescent about \' long. 





Fig. 158 



A much-branched tree, occasionally 25-30 high, with a short contorted often inclining 

 trunk sometimes 1 in diameter, and slender brittle branchlets coated at first with hoary 

 tomentum, pubescent and tomentose and dark red-brown or orange color during then- first 

 winter, becoming darker, pubescent or glabrous, and sometimes covered with a glaucous 

 bloom in their second season; more often shrubby and 6-15 tall. Winter-buds acute, 

 nearly terete, light red-brown, pubescent or puberulous, about \' long. Bark about ' 

 thick and broken into irregular closely appressed dark brown scales tinged with red. Wood 

 light, soft, close-grained, pale red, with thick nearly white sapwood. 



Distribution. Banks of streams and in low moist ground; Cook Inlet and Kadiak Island, 

 Alaska, southward in the neighborhood of the coast to Santa Barbara, California; on the 

 Marble Creek of the Kaweah River at 6900 altitude (f. Ralphiana Jeps.) 



VI. MYRICACEJE. 



Aromatic resinous trees and shrubs, with watery juice, terete branches, and small scaly 

 buds. Leaves alternate, re volute in the bud, serrate, resinous-punctate, persistent in our 

 species, in falling leaving elevated semiorbicular leaf -scars showing the ends of three nearly 

 equidistant fibro- vascular bundles. Flowers unisexual, dioecious or monoecious, usually 

 subtended by minute bractlets, in the axils of the deciduous scales of unisexual or androgy- 

 nous simple oblong aments from buds in the axils of the leaves of the year, opening in early 

 spring, the staminate below the pistillate in androgynous aments; staminate, perianth 0; 

 stamens 4 or many, inserted on the thickened base of the scales of the ament; filaments 

 slender, united at the base into a short stipe; anthers ovoid, erect, 2-celled, introrse, open- 

 ing longitudinally; ovary rudimentary or 0; pistillate flowers single or in pairs; ovary ses- 

 sile, 1-celled; styles short, divided into 2 elongated filiform stigmas stigmatic on the inner 

 face; ovule solitary, erect from the base of the cell, orthotropous, the micropyle superior. 

 Fruit a globose or ovoid dry drupe usually covered with waxy exudations; nut hard, thick- 

 walled. Seed erect, with a thin coat, without albumen; embryo straight; cotyledons plano- 

 convex, fleshy; radicle short, superior, turned away from the minute basal hilum. 



The family consists of the genus Myrica L., of about thirty or forty species of small 



