GINSENG FAMILY 
Flowers.—July, August. Perfect or polygamo-moneecious, cream 
white, borne in many-flowered umbels arranged in compound pani- 
cles, forming a terminal racemose cluster, three to four feet in length 
which rises, solitary or two or three together, above the spreading 
leaves. Bracts and bractlets lanceolate, acute, persistent. 
Caly.x.—Calyx tube coherent with the ovary, minutely five- 
toothed. 
Corolla.—Petals five, white, inserted on margin of the disk, acute, 
slightly inflexed at the apex, imbricate in bud. 
Sftamens.—Five, inserted on margin of the disk, alternate with the 
petals; filaments thread-like; anthers oblong, attached on the 
back, introrse, two-celled ; cells opening longitudinally. 
Pistil.—Ovary inferior, five-celled; styles five, connivent ; stig- 
mas capitate. 
fFruit.—Berry-like drupe, globular, black, one-fourth of an inch 
long, five-angled, crowned with the blackened styles. Flesh thin, 
dark. 
The habit of growth and general appearance of the Her- 
cules’ Club are unique. It is usually found as a group of 
unbranched stems, rising to the height of twelve to twenty 
feet, which bear upon their summits a crowded cluster of 
doubly compound leaves, thus giving to each stem a certain 
tropical palm-like appearance. This slender, swaying, palm- 
like character is in the north only true of the young plants, 
for after a single stem has buffeted the storms of many win- 
ters it becomes a scrubby, deformed, little tree whose great 
leaves can scarcely cover its ugliness even in summer. In 
the south it is said to reach the height of fifty feet, still re- 
taining its palm-like aspect. 
The young stem is stout, thickly covered with sharp spines 
and for the most part branchless or slightly branching, so that 
when denuded of its leaves it looks very like a club, whence 
its common name Hercules’ Club. The leaves are the largest 
produced by any tree of our flora, although the casual observer 
might not think so, as the leaflets are but two to three inches 
long. The leaves, however, are so compound, in this case 
doubly pinnate and sometimes pinnate again, that when one 
measures from the swollen base of the prickly petiole to the 
apex of the farthest leaflet the tape frequently records three 
feet and the spread of the pinnew from side to side is often 
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