THE MAGNOLIA FAMILY. 15 



entire length of the Japanese islands. At the north it grows at the sea-level, and is very 

 common, but on the main island it is confined to high elevations, and is rare. Except in 

 Yezo, it seldom grows more than twenty or thirty feet high, and I never saw it, in Hondo, 

 below 5,000 feet elevation, where, as at Yumoto, in the Nikk5 Mountains, it is scattered 

 through the lower borders of the Hemlock forest. 



Cercidiphyllum Japonicum is a valuable timber-tree, producing soft straight-grained light 

 yellow wood, which resembles the wood of Liriodendron, although rather lighter and softer, 

 and probably inferior in quality. It is easily worked, and in Yezo is a favorite material for 

 the interior finish of cheap houses and for cases, packing-boxes, etc. From its great trunks 

 the Ainos hollowed their canoes, and it is from this wood that they make the mortars found 

 in every Aino house and used in pounding grain. In New England, where there are now 

 trees twenty feet high, Cercidiphyllum is very hardy, and grows rapidly; in its young state it 

 is nearly as fastigiate in habit as a Lombardy Poplar, the trunk being covered from the 

 ground with slender upright branches that shade it from the sun, which seems injurious to 

 this tree, at least while young. As an ornamental plant, Cercidiphyllum is only valuable for 

 its peculiar Cercis-like leaves, which, when they unfold in early spring, are bright red, and for 

 its peculiar habit, as the flowers and fruit are neither conspicuous nor beautiful (see Plate 

 vii.). 



Of the other Japanese trees of this family, Euptelea polyandra is the least desirable as an 

 ornamental plant, and it will probably never be very much cultivated except as a botanical 

 curiosity. It is a small tree twenty to thirty feet in height, with a slender straight trunk 

 covered with smooth pale bark, stout rigid chestnut-brown branchlets, marked with white 

 spots, and wide-spreading branches, which form an open, rather unsightly head. The leaves 

 are thin, prominently veined, bright green, sometimes five or six inches long and broad, nearly 

 circular in outline, and deeply and very irregularly cut on the margins, with long, broad, 

 apical points; they are borne on long slender petioles, and turn to a dull yellow-brown color 

 before falling. The minute flowers appear in early spring before the leaves, and are produced 

 in three or four-flowered clusters from buds formed early in the previous autumn. They have 

 neither sepals nor petals, and consist of a number of slender stamens surrounding the free 

 clustered carpels. The fruit, which ripens in November, is not more showy than the flowers ; 

 it is a small stalked samara half an inch long, and furnished with an oblique marginal 

 membranaceous wing. The handsomest thing about this tree is the winter-bud, which is 

 obtuse, half an inch long, and covered with imbricated scales, which are bright chestnut- 

 brown, and as lustrous as if they had been covered with a coat of varnish. Euptelea poly- 

 andra is found in the mountainous forests of central Japan, usually on the banks or in the 

 neighborhood of streams between 2,000 and 3,000 feet above the sea-level, but does not 

 appear to be anywhere very common. 



The third genus of this family, Trochodendron, like Euptelea, produces flowers without 

 sepals and petals. The only species, Trochodendron aralioides, is a small handsome glabrous 

 evergreen tree, with alternate broadly rhomboidal crenulate penniveined leaves, four or five 

 inches long ; they are borne on elongated stout petioles, and are clustered at the extremities 

 of the branches. The flowers are produced in short terminal racemes, and consist of numerous 



