STORAX FAMILY 



except that one prefers the mountains, the other the swamps. 

 The Snowdrop never becomes a large tree, thirty feet is its 

 maximum height. The leaves are ovate, when full grown are 

 four to five inches long, three to four inches wide, with very 

 conspicuous veins and stout petioles. The flower is cream- 

 white, the corolla fully an inch long and divided nearly to 

 the base into spreading divisions about as long as the 

 stamens, which are usually eight in number. The ovary is 

 two-celled and like the exserted stigma coated with pale 

 tomentum. The fruit is oblong, com- 

 pressed, one and one-half to two 

 inches long, often an inch wide with 

 two broad wings and sometimes little, 

 narrow, supplementary wings between 

 them. The fruit of the Silverbell has 

 four wings, whence the early specific 

 name tetraptera. 



The Snowdrop-tree is perfectly 

 hardy on the southern shore of Lake 

 Erie where it forms a small tree with 

 a beautiful, low, broad head. In flower 

 and foliage and general appearance 

 the Silverbell and the Snowdrop are 

 twin sisters and one is not to be pre- 

 ferred to the other. 



The name of the genus has suf- 

 fered vicissitudes. In the earlier bot- 

 anies the generic name was Halesia, 

 but that is now displaced by Mohrodendron. Halesia was a 

 name given to the genus in 1759 in honor of Stephen Hales, a 

 botanist of the eighteenth century who wrote one of the first 

 English books upon vegetable physiology. But it happened 

 that an explorer in Jamaica four years before had given the 

 same name to a genus of tropical plants. So that two widely 

 different genera appeared in the books as Halesia. Such dup- 

 lication of names became in course of time a source of great 

 confusion in botanic nomenclature and the American Associa- 



Fruit of Snowdrop-tree, Mohro 

 dendron dipterum. 



204 



