LEGUMINOSAE 69 



24. Leaves with incurved teeth: buds brown. P. serotina. 

 Leaves with spreading teeth, relatively short. 25. 



25. Buds brown: flowers rather large (15 mm.). P. Padus. 

 Buds straw-colored: flowers small (10 mm.). P. virginiana. 



Family LEGUMINOSAE. Pea Family. 

 A very large and heterogeneous widespread family com- 

 prising some of the most valuable plants- of farm and garden, 

 the sweet pea of florists, and many of the most useful plant 

 materials of landscape gardeners, and producing some of the 

 most costly tropical cabinet woods. Through their power of 

 fixing atmospheric nitrogen, even weeds of this family enrich 

 poor soil. 



GYMNOCLADUS. Kentucky Coffee Tree. 

 Deciduous large rough-barked trees with hard pinkish 

 wood with rather large crowded ducts in spring, those of au- 

 tumn reduced in size and number and in a wavy transverse 

 pattern, and fine medullary rays; stout round twigs with large 

 chocolate-colored continuous pith; alternate somewhat raised 

 large bluntly heart-shaped leaf-iears with about 5 bundle-traces; 

 small if any stipule scars; round indistinctly scaly superposed 

 buds sunken in ciliate craters, the end-bud absent; large, ab- 

 ruptly pinnate or bipinnate leaves' with entire leaflets; often 

 imperfect pale polypetalous regular flowers with tubular calyx, 

 in terminal panicles; and large thick-walled legumes with 

 large brown seeds. 

 Base of leaves once pinnate: leaflets bristle-pointed G. dioica. 



GLEDITSIA. Honey Locust. 



Often large deciduous deliquescent trees mostly with 

 branched spines above axils; yellowish or finally reddish hard 

 wood with moderately large ducts crowded in the vernal wood 

 and passing into smaller ones in more or less evident wavy 

 transverse parenchyma-patterns later in the season, and mod- 

 erate medullary rays replaced at intervals by heavier ones; 

 moderately stout rounded rather zig-zag twigs 1 somewhat swol- 



