THE WITCH:-HAZEL AND ARALIA FAMILIES. 43 



acute, compressed, angled by mutual pressure, with a thick hard dark chestnut-brown 

 lustrous coat, an oblong pale lateral hilum,and thin albumen surrounding the terete embryo, 

 with its long erect radicle and thick ovate cotyledons. 



Disanthus cercidifolia ^ is not rare in the valley of the Kisogawa on the Nakasendo, in 

 central Hondo, where it is occasionally found, covering steep hillsides with thickets sometimes 

 a quarter of an acre in extent. In habit and in the autumn color of its leaves Disanthus is 

 one of the most beautiful shrubs which I saw in Japan, and if it flourishes in our gardens it 

 should prove one of the best plants of its class recently introduced into cultivation. 



The Aralia family has no representative in eastern North America outside of the genus 

 Aralia and only one woody plant, Aralia spinosa, a small tree of the middle and southern 

 states. In Japan the family appears in no less than eight genera. The Ivy of Europe 

 reaches Japan, where it is rather common in the south, although we did not meet with it 

 north of the Hakone Mountains and the region about Fuji-san. Helwingia, a genus with 

 two species of shrubs, remarkable in this family for the position of the flowers which are 

 produced on the upper surface of the midribs of the leaves, is Japanese and Himalayan. In 

 Japan Helwingia ranges to southern Yezo, where, in the peninsula south of Volcano Bay, in 

 common with a number of other plants, it finds its most northern home. 



In the flora of Japan, Fatsia is represented by the handsome evergreen plant, Fatsia 

 (Aralia) Japonica, now well known in our conservatories, an inhabitant of the extreme 

 southern part of the empire, although often cultivated in the gardens of Tokyo, both in the 

 open ground and in pots ; and by Fatsia horrida, a low shrub with stout well-armed stems, 

 large palmately lobed leaves and bright red fruit, which is also common on the mountains 

 of the northwest coast region of North America, from Oregon to Sitka. In Japan we found 

 it growing under the dense shade of the Hemlock forests on steep rocky slopes above Lake 

 Yumoto, in the Nikko Mountains, at an elevation of 5,000 feet above the sea-level, and in 

 Yezo. The third member of the genus, Fatsia papyrifera, from the thick pith of whose 

 branches the Chinese rice-paper is made, and an inhabitant of central and southern China 

 and of Formosa, is frequently seen in Tokyo gardens, as it is in those of the United States 

 and Europe. In Yezo is found a representative of the Manchurian and Chinese genus Eleu- 

 therococcus, a shrub still to be introduced into our gardens, and Panax repens, a delicate 

 herb with trailing stems and bright red fruit, which manages to live on mountain-slopes 

 under the dense shade of Bamboos, while Dendropanax, a tropical genus of trees and shrubs 

 of the New World, as well as of the Old, reaches southern Japan with a single shrubby 

 species, Dendropanax Japonicum. 



Aralia is more multiplied in species in eastern America, where six are known, than it is in 

 Japan, whose flora contains only two, although a third, the Ginseng (Aralia quinquefoha), a 

 native of Manchuria, northern China, and the United States, has been cultivated for centuries 

 in Japan for the roots, which the Chinese esteem for medicine and buy in large quantities, 

 sometimes paying fabulous prices for them, especially for the wild Manchurian roots, which 

 are considered more valuable than those obtained from North America or from plants culti- 

 vated in Japan, or in Corea, where Ginseng cultivation is one of the most important branches 



1 Maximowicz, Mel. Biol. vi. 21 (1866). 



