104 Botanical Department. [Bulletin 108 



"Flowers in few-flowered, open panicles; corolla inconspicuously spotted. 

 Fruit stout. Leaves caudate acuminate. 



"A tree in the forest occasionally 120 feet in height, with a tall, straight 

 trunk, rarely four and a half feet in diameter, and a narrow, round-tipped 

 crown of slender branches; usually smaller, although often a hundred feet 

 high, and when grown in open situations rarely more than fifty feet in 

 height, with a short trunk and a broad head of spreading branches. The 

 bark of the trunk is three-quarters of an inch or sometimes nearly an inch 

 thick, brown tinged with red, and broken on the surface with thick scales. 

 The branchlets are stout, and when they first appear are light green, often 

 tinged with purple, and covered with scattered pale hairs; during the first win- 

 ter they are light orange color or reddish brown, covered with a slight bloom, 

 and marked with many pale, conspicuous lenticels, and with the elevated oval 

 leaf-scars, which are a quarter of an inch long and display a circular row of 

 large fibro-vascular bundle scars ; in their second and third years the branches 

 grow darker and the leaf-scars and lenticels nearly disappear. The end of the 

 branch dies in the autumn without forming a terminal bud, and during the win- 

 ter appears as an elevated circular scar close to the upper axillary bud. The buds 

 are minute, globose, partly immersed in the bark, and covered with loosely im- 

 bricated chestnut-brown ovate scales, keeled on the back and slightly apiculate 

 at the apex; those of the inner ranks are accrescent and at maturity are 

 foliaceous, obovate, acute, gradually narrowed below a sessile base, many nerved, 

 with dark veins pubescent on the lower surface, and sometimes nearly two and 

 a half inches long and three-quarters of an inch broad. The leaves are opposite 

 or in threes, oval, long-pointed, cordate at the base, and usually entire or fur- 

 nished with one or two lateral teeth ; when they unfold they are pilose on the 

 upper surface and covered on the lower and on the petioles with pale or rufous 

 tomentum, which soon disappears, and at maturity they are thick and firm, 

 dark green above and pale and covered with soft pubescence below, especially 

 along the stout midribs and the principal veins marked in their axils with large 

 clusters of dark glands. They are ten or twelve inches long, seven or eight 

 inches broad, and are borne on stout terete petioles four to six inches in length. 

 They turn black and fall after the first severe frost of the autumn. The flowers, 

 which appear late in May or early in June, are borne on slender purple pedicels, 

 furnished near the middle with one or three bractlets, and are produced in open 

 few-flowered panicles five or six inches long and broad, with green or purple 

 branches marked with orange- colored lenticels, the lowest being often developed 

 from the axils of small leaves. The calyx is purple and divided at the base into 

 two ovate pointed apiculate divisions. The corolla is white, with a broad conical 

 oblique tube nearly an inch long, often marked externally with purple spots 

 near the base, and internally on the lower side with two bands of yellow blotches 

 which follow two parallel lateral ridges, and with occasional purple spots spread- 

 ing over the lobes of the lower lips of the limb, which, when the flower is fully 

 opened, has a vertical diameter of nearly two inches and a horizontal diameter 

 of two inches and a half. The filaments, which are marked near the base with 

 a few oblong purple spots, are slightly exserted, and rather longer than the slen- 

 der glabrous style. The fruit is eight to twenty inches long and one-half to 

 three-quarters of an inch in the middle, with a thick wall, which towards spring 

 splits into two concave valves; the partition is thickened in the middle and 

 nearly triangular in section. The seed is an inch long and a third of an inch 

 broad, with a light brown coat, and wings which are rounded at the ends and 

 terminate in a fringe of rather short hairs. 



