THE MAPLE FAMILY. 29 



the forests of Hokkaido, where it occasionally attains the height of fifty feet, and forms a 

 trunk eighteen inches in diameter. It is a tree of wide and general distribution in Japan, 

 Manchuria, China, and northern India, and even in Japan varies remarkably in the size and 

 pubescence of the five to seven-lobed leaves truncate at the base, and in the size and shape of 

 the fruit. This tree must be extremely beautiful in May, when the yellow flowers are just 

 opening, for the large lengthened inner scales of the winter-buds are then bright orange- 

 color and very showy. The autumn coloring of the leaves I did not see ; it is described as 

 yellow and red. 



Of more interest to the lovers of novelties is Acer Miyabei (see Plate ix.), the latest 

 addition to the list of Japanese Maples. It is a tree thirty to forty feet in height, with 

 a trunk twelve to eighteen inches in diameter, covered with pale deeply furrowed bark, 

 spreading branches which form a round-topped handsome head, and stout branchlets orange- 

 brown in their first, and ashy gray in their second season. The leaves are five-lobed by 

 narrow sinuses, with acute entire irregularly two to three-lobed divisions, and are cordate or 

 almost truncate at the base, five-ribbed, conspicuously reticulate-veined, puberulous on the 

 ribs and in their axils on the upper surface, and more or less covered with ferrugineous pubes- 

 cence on the lower surface, especially on the ribs and veins ; they are dark green above, pale 

 below, and four or five inches long and broad, and are borne on stout petioles enlarged at 

 the base, two to seven inches in length, and thickly coated while young with pale hairs, which 

 also cover the unfolding leaves. The flowers, which are yellow, are produced on slender pedi- 

 cels in few-flowered, short-stalked corymbs. The sepals and petals are narrow, obovate, acute 

 and ciliate on the margins ; in the male flowers the stamens, composed of filiform filaments 

 and minute ovate anthers, are inserted between the lobes of a conspicuous disk, and are longer 

 than the petals ; the pistil is minute and rudimentary ; in the fertile flowers the stamens are 

 rudimentary and shorter than the ovary, which is coated with long white hairs. The style, 

 which is described as somewhat shorter than the revolute stigmas, is caducous. The fruit is 

 two inches long, with broad puberulous nutlets diverging at right angles to the stem, and 

 thin, slightly falcate, conspicuously veined wings. This fine tree, which is closely related to 

 the European Acer platanoides, was discovered a few years ago in the province of Hidaka, in 

 Hokkaido, by Professor Kingo Miyabe, the accomplished professor of botany in the college at 

 Sapporo and the author of an important work on the flora of the Kurile Islands, in whose 

 honor it was named in 1888 by Maximowicz.^ 



On the 18th of September we stopped quite by accident to change cars at the httle town of 

 Iwanigawa, a raihoad junction in Yezo, some forty or fifty miles from Sapporo, and, having a 

 few minutes on our hands, strolled out of the town to a small grove of trees in the hope that 

 they might prove interesting. In this grove, occupying a piece of low ground on the borders 

 of a small stream, and chiefly composed of Acer pictum, our Japanese guide recognized at a 

 glance a number of fine trees of Acer Miyabei covered with fruit, and surrounding the house 

 of an officer of the Imperial Forest Department, who had been living for years in entire 

 ignorance of the fact that he was enjoying the shade of one of the rarest trees in Japan. 

 The find was a lucky one, for Iwanigawa is a long way from the station where this species 



1 Mel. Biol. xii. 725. 



