STORAX FAMILY 
except that one prefers the mountains, the other the swamps. 
The Snowdrop never becomes a large tree, thirty feet is its 
maximum height. The leaves are ovate, when full grown are 
four to five inches long, three to four inches wide, with very 
conspicuous veins and stout petioles. The flower is cream- 
white, the corolla fully an inch long and divided nearly to 
the base into spreading divisions about as long as the 
stamens, which are usually eight in number. The ovary is 
two-celled and like the exserted stigma coated with pale 
tomentum. The fruit is oblong, com- 
pressed, one and one-half to two 
inches long, often an inch wide with 
two broad wings and sometimes little, 
narrow, supplementary wings between 
them. The fruit of the Silverbell has 
four wings, whence the early specific 
name /etraptera. 
The Snowdrop-tree is perfectly 
hardy on the southern shore of Lake 
Erie where it forms a small tree with 
a beautiful, low, broad head. In flower 
and foliage and general appearance 
the Silverbell and the Snowdrop are 
twin sisters and one is not to be pre- 
ferred to the other. 
The name of the genus has suf- 
fered vicissitudes. In the earlier bot- 
anies the generic name was /a/esia, 
but that is now displaced by Mohrodendron, Halesia was a 
name given to the genus in 1759 in honor of Stephen Hales, a 
botanist of the eighteenth century who wrote one of the first 
English books upon vegetable physiology. But it happened 
that an explorer in Jamaica four years before had given the 
same name to a genus of tropical plants. So that two widely 
different genera appeared in the books as Ha/esia. Such dup- 
lication of names became in course of time a source of great 
confusion in botanic nomenclature and the American Associa: 
204 
Fruit of Snowdrop-tree, Mohro- 
dendron dipterum. 
