310 WOODY PLANTS OF MASSACHUSETTS. 
rapidly, dividing into three branches, which formed a small, 
round, rather dense top, fifty or sixty feet high. It was covered 
with a very rough, brownish gray bark, and had, altogether, 
so much the aspect of an elm, that it was, almost universally, 
taken for one. I was informed that a still larger tree of the 
same kind had formerly grown near it. Within two years, this 
noble tree has fallen, like its brother, before the axe of wnprove- 
ment. ‘Ihe leaf-bearing branchlets are very slender, slightly 
downy, and covered with a reddish brown bark. The buds 
are small, compressed, and rather pointed. The leaves are 
four or five mches long and less than two wide, borne on a 
small, round, short, somewhat hairy stalk. They are unequal- 
sided, the side next the branch being much broader than the 
other and strongly half-heart-shaped ; the other side being some- 
times, but not always, half-hearted; they are oblong, tapering 
very slowly, ending in a long acumination, and sharply serrate 
almost to the very point; rough on both surfaces, bright green 
above, pale beneath. They are less thick than the leaves of the 
nettle tree; although, in other respects, they correspond suffi- 
ciently well with the description and figure of Michaux.* To 
him and to other writers, I am indebted for the remainder of 
this description; for | have not seen the flowers, fruit or wood. 
The trunk is commonly straight and without branches to a 
great height. The bark is grayish and broken, thickly and 
irregularly set with hard, blackish, permanent, corky asperities. 
‘The branches are nearly horizontal and slender. The branch- 
lets inclined or pendent, small, close-set, brown, scattered with 
small, whitish warts; the young ones green, more or less downy. 
‘The leaves on the vigorous shoots are from four to seven inches 
long, and often of equal breadth, deeply toothed and rough, 
sometimes almost equal-sided, sometimes exactly heart-shaped, 
sometimes half-heart-shaped, or ovate-lanceolate. The stipules 
are linear-lanceolate and pointed. Flowers of the size of those 
of the nettle tree, with the segments of the perianth oblong, 
obtuse, fringed at tip, ciate on the border. Ovary conical, sur- 
* Spach, who is familiar with the tree as cultivated in France, finds fault with 
this figure, because the fruits are incorrectly represented as black, and as growing 
upon a stout and vigorous shoot with large and thick leaves. 
