736 TREES OF NORTH AMERICA 



A tree, 12-15 high, with a straight trunk 6'-7' in diameter, stout rigid spread- 

 ing branches forming a compact regular round-topped head, and slightly many- 

 angled branchlets yellow-green or light orange-colored and coated with short soft 



pale ferrugineous pubescence when they first appear, terete, darker and sometimes 

 reddish brown and marked by orbicular depressed conspicuous leaf-scars and with 

 many scattered pale lenticels in their second year, becoming glabrous and red-brown 

 or ashy gray the following season, without terminal buds. Winter-buds axillary, 

 minute, nearly globose, immersed in the bark. Bark of the trunk thin, smooth, blue- 

 gray, and usually more or less marked by pale or nearly white blotches. Wood 

 heavy, hard, very close-grained, rich brown, beautifully marked with darker medul- 

 lary rays. 



Distribution. Dry coral soil in the immediate neighborhood of the shore; Sani- 

 bel Island to the southern keys, and to the borders of the Everglades; Florida; 

 exceedingly rare and most abundant and of its largest size on the Marquesas keys; 

 also on the Bahama Islands. 



LII. SAPOTACE^E. 



Trees or shrubs, with milky juice. Leaves alternate, simple, entire, pinnately 

 veined, mostly coriaceous, petiolate, without stipules. Flowers perfect, regular, 

 small, in axillary clusters ; calyx of 5-8 sepals imbricated in the bud, persist- 

 ent under the fruit ; corolla hypogynous, 5-8-cleft, the divisions imbricated in 

 the bud, often with as many or twice as many internal appendages borne on 

 its throat ; disk ; fertile stamens as many as and opposite the divisions of 

 the corolla and inserted on its short tube, often with sterile filaments (stami- 

 nodia) alternate with them ; anthers generally extrorse, 2-celled, the cells open- 

 ing longitudinally ; pistil of united carpels ; ovary sessile, usually 5-celled ; 

 style simple ; ovules solitary in each cell, attached to an axile placenta, ascend- 

 ing, anatropous ; raphe ventral ; micropyle inferior. Fruit baccate, bearing at 

 the apex the remnant of the style, usually 1-celled and 1-seeded. Seed with or 

 without albumen ; embryo large ; radicle terete, inferior. 



This family with thirty-one genera is chiefly tropical and subtropical, with 

 only Bumelia extending in North America into temperate regions. Some of the 



