BEECH FAMILY 
bright clear yellow. Petioles short, stout, slightly angled. Stipules 
saducous. 
Flowers.—June, July. Moneecious, fragrant. Staminate catkins 
six to eight inches in length, with stout, green, hairy stems covered 
with flower clusters. The androgynous catkins are slender, hairy, 
from two and a half to five inches in length, near their base are two 
or three clusters of pistillate flowers ; above these pistillate flowers 
are scattered clusters of staminate flowers; these are smaller than 
those on the staminate catkins and fall from the persistent rachis ; 
which continues to rise above the short raceme of fruit. The stami- 
nate flowers appear in three to seven-flowered cymes in the axils of 
minute bracts which are borne on the rachis of the ament. Calyx 
bell-shaped, pale straw color, six-lobed, lobes imbricate in bud, 
corolla wanting. Stamens ten to twenty inserted on the torus ; fila- 
ments exserted, white; anthers pale yellow, introrse, two-celled, 
cells opening longitudinally. Ovary has aborted.  Pistillate flowers 
appear solitary or two or three together within a short stemmed in- 
volucre of closely imbricated green scales, at the base of a bract 
borne on the rachis of the pistillate aments. Calyx bell-shaped, six- 
lobed. Stamensrudimentary. Ovary inferior, six-celled, styles six, 
white, hairy, exserted ; ovules two in each cell. The involucres or 
burs grow rapidly, are full size by the middle of August, begin to 
open with the first frost and shedding their nuts fall late in autumn. 
Fruit.—Nuts much compressed, two or three in a bur, coated at 
the apex with thick pale tomentum. The shell is lined with thick 
rufous tomentum and the seed is sweet. 
Defenseless in the common road she stands 
Exposed to restless war of vulgar hands, 
By neighboring clowns and passing rabble torn 
Battered with stones by boys and left forlorn. 
—CowLgy. 
The amber buds of the chestnut are unfolding into long green fans, though it 
will be long ere the trees decked with their drooping tassels hum like great 
hives with the music of the bees. 
—EDITH THOMAS. 
m some places we fynd chestnutts, whose wild fruict I maie well saie equalize 
ithe best in France, Spaine, Germany, Italy or those so commended in the Black 
Sea by Constantinople, all of which I have eaten. 
—HIsTORIE OF TRAVAILE INTO VIRGINIA BRITANNIA, 
The Chestnut stands unnoticed in the forest until mid- 
summer when, all at once, after the other trees have blossomed 
and some of them fruited, after the elm has scattered her 
samaras, the red maple dropped her keys, when cherries are 
tipe and apples half grown, the Chestnut flings out het 
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