BORRAGINACE^i 861 



scales. Wood light, rather soft, close-grained, and dark brown, with thick light brown 

 sap wood. 



Distribution. Dry limestone ridges, and depressions in the desert; valley of the Rio 

 Grande, Texas, and southern New Mexico, southward into Mexico; most abundant and of 

 its largest size in Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon between the mouth of the Rio Grande 

 and the base of the Sierra Madre. 



2. BEURERIA Jacq. 



Trees or shrubs, with oblong-obovate or ovate leaves involute in the bud, persistent. 

 Flowers on slender bracteolate pedicels, in terminal corymbose many-flowered cymes, with 

 linear-lanceolate caducous bracts and bractlets; calyx campanulate, 5-toothed, the divi- 

 sions closed and valvate in the bud; corolla white, campanulate, the lobes broad-ovate, 

 spreading after an thesis; anthers ovoid, rugulose, apiculate; ovary incompletely 4-celled by 

 the development of the 2 parietal placentas, narrowed into a terminal style 2-parted at 

 apex, the divisions more or less coalescent; stigmas capitate; ovules attached on the back 

 near the middle of the inner face of the re volute placentas, anatropous; raphe ventral; mi- 

 cropyle superior. Fruit subglobose, flesh thin; stone somewhat 4-lobed and separable into 

 4 thick-walled bony 1-seeded nutlets rounded and furnished on the back with a thick 

 spongy longitudinal many-ridged appendage, flattened on their converging inner faces and 

 attached at apex to a filiform column. Seed terete, filling the seminal cell, longitudinally 

 incurved round a rather small cavity opposite an elevated oblong scar on one of the inner 

 faces of the nutlet and connected with the hilum by a narrow passage; seed-coat mem- 

 branaceous, light brown; embryo axile in fleshy albumen; cotyledons plane; radicle slender, 

 elongated, turned toward the hilum. 



Beureria with forty species is confined to tropical America, two species reaching the 

 shores of southern Florida; of these one is a tree and the other Beureria revoluta H. B. K. is 

 an arborescent shrub. - 



The generic name is in honor of J. A. Beurer, an apothecary at Nuremberg. 



1. Beureria ovata Meyers. 

 Beureria havanensis Hitch., not Meyers. 



Leaves elliptic to oval or broad-obovate, acute and often apiculate or rounded and then 

 occasionally emarginate at apex, gradually narrowed and cuneate at basp entire, densely 



Fig. 762 



covered when they unfold with white caducous hairs, and at maturity thick, dark yellow- 

 green and lustrous above, paler below, 2^'-3' long and lj'-2' wide, with slightly thickened 



