Joewood 



771 



base. The deliciously fragrant flowers, appearing during the winter months, are 

 perfect and regular, in terminal smooth, many-flowered racemes 2 to 6 cm. long, on 

 stout pedicels about i cm. long; the calyx is bell-shaped, with 5 orbicular, blunt 

 sepals; the corolla is white, salverform, about i cm. across, the spreading lobes 

 longer than the tube, oblong and blunt; filaments flat, broad at the base, the 

 anthers oblong or ovate, extrorse, 2-celled; ovary ovoid, i-celled; stigma shghtly 

 5-lobed; ovules numerous, not immersed in the placenta. The fruit, ripening in 



Fig. 703. — Joewood, Bahamas. 



the autumn, is a leathery, orange-red berry, subglobose, 8 to 10 mm. in diameter, 

 tipped by the remnants of the style, skin thin and hard. 



The wood is hard and very dense, brown, with darker medullary rays; its spe- 

 cific gravity is about 0.69. 



The genus contains probably 35 species of shrubs or trees pecuHar to tropical 

 America. The name is in commemoration of Nicholas Joseph Jacquin (1728- 

 1818), an Austrian botanist, who spent many years in tropical America. J. 

 armillaris Jacquin, of the West Indies, is the type of the genus. 



