PLATANACE^ 343 



by small white dots, becoming in their second year dark or reddish brown; usually 

 a stout shrub sending up from the ground numerous rigid diverging stems 5-20 

 tall. "Winter-buds acute, slightly falcate, light orange-brown, covered with short 

 fine pubescence, '-' long. Bark \' thick, light brown, generally smooth but broken 

 into minute thin appressed scales disclosing in falling the dark reddish purple inner 

 bark. Wood heavy, hard, very close-grained, light brown tinged with red, with 

 thick nearly white sapwood of 30-40 layers of annual growth. The bark and leaves 

 are slightly astringent and although not known to possess essential properties are 

 largely used in the form of fluid extracts and decoctions and in homoeopathic practice, 

 Pond's Extract being made by distilling the bark in diluted alcohol. 



Distribution. Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the valley of the St. Lawrence 

 River to southern Ontario, Wisconsin and eastern Nebraska, and southward to north- 

 ern Florida and eastern Texas, growing usually on the borders of the forest in low 

 rich soil or on the rocky banks of streams; of its largest size and probably only arbo- 

 rescent on the slopes of the high Alleghany Mountains in North and South Carolina 

 and Tennessee. 



Occasionally cultivated as an ornamental plant in the northern states, and in 

 western and northern Europe. 



XX. PLATANACEJE. 



Trees, with watery juice, thick deeply furrowed scaly bark exfoliating from 

 the branches and young trunks in large thin plates, terete zigzag pithy branch- 

 lets prolonged by an upper axillary bud, and fibrous roots. Winter-buds 

 axillary, conical, large, smooth, and lustrous, nearly surrounded at the base by 

 the narrow leaf-scars displaying a row of conspicuous dark fibro-vascular 

 bundle-scars, covered by 3 deciduous scales, the 2 inner accrescent, strap- 

 shaped, rounded at the apex at maturity, marking in falling the base of the 

 branchlet with narrow ring-like scars, the outer scale surrounding the bud and 

 splitting longitudinally with its expansion, the second light green, covered by 

 a gummy fragrant secretion and usually inclosing a bud in its axil, the third 

 coated with long rufous hairs. Leaves longitudinally plicate in vernation, 

 alternate, broadly ovate, cordate, truncate, or wedge-shaped and decurrent 

 on the petiole at the base, more or less acutely 3-7-lobed, and occasionally 

 furnished with a more or less enlarged basal lobe, the lobes entire, dentate, 

 with minute remote callous teeth, or coarsely sinuate-toothed, penniveined, the 

 veins arcuate and united near the margins and connected by inconspicuous 

 reticulate veinlets, clothed while young like the petioles, stipules, and young 

 branchlets with caducous stellate sharp-pointed branching hairs, pale on the 

 lower and rufous on the upper surface, long-petiolate, turning brown and 

 withering in the autumn before falling ; their petioles abruptly enlarged at 

 the base and inclosing the buds, stipules membranaceous, laterally united below 

 into a short tube surrounding the branchlet above the insertion of their leaf, 

 acute, more or less free above, dentate or entire, thin and scarious on flowering 

 shoots, broad and leaf-like on vigorous sterile branchlets, caducous, marking the 

 branchlet in falling with narrow ring-like scars. Flowers minute, appearing 

 with the unfolding of the leaves in dense unisexual pedunculate solitary or 

 spicate heads, the staminate and pistillate heads on separate peduncles or rarely 

 united on the same peduncle ; staminate heads dark red on axillary peduncles ; 

 pistillate heads light green tinged with red, on long terminal peduncles, the 



