FAGACEJE 245 



brown, with thin nearly white sapwood; largely manufactured into lumber in the 

 Mississippi valley arid valued almost as highly as white oak. 



Distribution. Rich bottom-lands and the alluvial banks of streams; southwest- 

 ern Virginia to northern Florida, and through the Gulf states and Arkansas to 

 southern Missouri, western Tennessee and Kentucky, and southern Illinois and 

 Indiana; most abundant and one of the largest and most valuable timber-trees in 

 the river swamps of the Yazoo basin, Mississippi, and of eastern Arkansas. 



13. Quercus Marilandica, Muench. Black Jack. Jack Oak. 



Leaves broadly obovate, rounded or cordate at the narrow base, usually 3 or rarely 

 5-lobed at the broad and often abruptly dilated apex, with short or long, broad or 

 narrow, rounded or acute, entire or dentate lobes, or entire or dentate at the apex, 

 sometimes oblong-obovate, undulate-lobed at the broad apex and entire below or 



equally 3-lobed, with elongated spreading lateral lobes broad and lobulate at the 

 apex, when they unfold coated with a clammy tomentum of articulate hairs, and 

 bright pink on the upper surface, at maturity thick and firm or subcoriaceous, dark 

 yellow-green and very lustrous above, yellow, orange color, or brown and scurfy- 

 pubescent below, usually G'-T long and broad, with thick broad orange-colored mid- 

 ribs, turning brown or yellow in the autumn before falling; their petioles stout, 

 yellow, glabrous or pubescent, '-f long. Flowers: staminate in hoary aments 

 2'-4' long; calyx thin and scarious, tinged with red above the middle, pale-pubescent 

 on the outer surface, divided into 4 or 5 broad ovate rounded lobes; anthers apicu- 

 late, dark red; pistillate on short rusty-tomentose peduncles coated like their involucral 

 scales with thick rusty tomentum; stigmas dark red. Fruit, solitary or in pairs, 

 usually pedunculate; acorn oblong, full and rounded at the ends, rather broader 

 below than above the middle, about |' long, light yellow-brown and often striate, the 

 shell lined with dense fulvous tomentum, inclosed for one third to nearly two thirds 

 its length in a thick turbinate light brown cup puberulous on the inner surface, and 

 covered by large reddish brown loosely imbricated scales often ciliate and coated 

 with loose pale or rusty tomentum, the upper scales smaller, erect, inserted on the 

 top of the cup in several rows, and forming a thick rim round its inner surface, or 

 occasionally reflexed and covering the upper half of the inner surface of the cup. 

 A tree, 20-30, or occasionally 40-50 high, with a trunk rarely more than 18' 



