CARICACEvE 755 



A bushy tree, rarely 20-25high, with a short stout trunk sometimes 6-8 long and afoot 

 in diameter; more often a low branching shrub forming impenetrable thickets often of con- 

 siderable extent. Wood very hard, heavy, close-grained, dark brown somewhat streaked 

 with orange, becoming almost black on exposure, with thin yellow or nearly white sapwood 

 of 12-15 layers of annual growth. 



Distribution. Dry gravelly mesas and foothills; valleys of the upper Colorado River 



Fig. 680 



(Big Springs, Howard County), and of the lower Rio Grande, Texas, westward through 

 southern Texas and New Mexico to southern Arizona, and southward through northern 

 Mexico, and in Lower California (San Jorge). 



XLIV. CARICACEJE. 



Trees or shrubs, with bitter milky juice, and alternate long-petiolate persistent simple or 

 digitately compound leaves, without stipules. Flowers unisexual or perfect, the perianth 

 of the male and female flowers dissimilar; stamens in two series, inserted on the corolla; 

 filaments free; anthers introrse. Fruit baccate. 



The Pawpaw family with two genera is tropical American and Mexican, a single repre- 

 sentative of the family reaching the shores of southern Florida. 



1. CARICA L. 



Short-lived trees, with erect simple or rarely branched stems composed of a thin shell 

 of soft fibrous wood surrounding a large central cavity divided by thin soft cross partitions 

 at the nodes, and covered wijh thin green or gray bark marked by the ring-like scars of 

 fallen leaf-stalks, and stout soft fleshy roots. Leaves simple, palmately lobed or digitate, 

 crowded toward the top of the stem and branches, large, flaccid, subpeltately palmately 

 nerved, and usually deeply and often compoundly lobed. Flowers regular, monoecious 

 or polygamo-dicecious, white, yellow, or greenish white, in axillary cymose panicles, the 

 staminate elongated, pedunculate, and many-flowered, the pistillate abbreviated and few 

 or usually 3-flowered, generally unisexual and direcious, occasionally polygamo-dioscious, 

 each flower in the axil of a minute ovate acute bract; calyx minute, 5-lobed, the lobes alter- 

 nate with the petals; corolla of the staminate flower salverform, gamopetalous, the tube 

 elongated, 5-lobed, the lobes oblong or linear, contorted in the bud; stamens 10; filaments 

 free, those of the outer row alternate with the lobes of the corolla and elongated, the others 

 alternate with them and abbreviated; anthers 2-celled, erect, opening longitudinally, often 

 surmounted by their slightly elongated connective; ovary rudimentary, subulate; pistillate 



