2S 
ANNALS OF THB 
in time to come, many now present would rejoice that they had assisted in laying 
the foundation of the Botanical Society of Canada. 
The following papei*s were read : — 
ON THE CORNUS FLORIDA OF THE U. S. 
By Professor Geohge S. Blackie, M. D., Nashville, Tennessee. 
Common throughout all our forests, conspicuous in Spring time by its festoons 
of large white blossoms, and equally so during the Fall months from its clusters of 
scarlet berries, a handsome little tree, usually about fifteen to twenty feet high, is 
the Cormis Jiorida^ L. of the U. S. I have brought this plant before your notice 
for no particular reason, but that it this morning attracted my attention as 1 walked 
in the neighborhood of my home, and I conceive that much service may be done 
to the existing state of the botanical knowledge of our country, should each mem- 
ber of the Society take up, meeting after meeting, some individual plant, no matter 
how common, and stale all that he knows of that plant, whether such information 
be gleaned from his own studies or those of others. On ray first visit to the United 
States, one of the first objects which attracted my attention on travelling down the 
Mississippi, from the snows of Canada to the balmy spring of Louisiana, was this 
plant, and its extreme beauty, contrasted with the gluomincss of the scenery from 
which I had just emerged, made so strong an impression on me that 1 have ever 
since looked on it with a peculiar interest. 
Cornus flori.da is probably the most generally distributed species of its genus 
m this country. In. this genus, which is a member of the family of Cornacece, there 
are about twenty species, of which America has, north of Mexico, eleven, two are 
peculiar to Mexico, three ai'e found in Nepaul, two in Japan, two are found in both 
Asia and Europe, and one is found in the north of both hemispheres. They are all 
shrubs, with entire, deciduous leaves, covered with adpressed hairs, the calyx four- 
toothed, minute, adhering to the ovary ; the petals few, distinct, oblong, inserted 
with the calyx into an epigynous disk, drupes baccate ; flowers in cymes. In this 
State (Tenn.) we have at least five species, viz., C. paniculala, C. dricta^ C. aspen- 
folia, C. sericea, and the subject of my present paper. In addition to these, in the 
north there are found the species O. Canadensis, G. circinala, C. alba, O. allerni- 
folia, and C. sanguinea. The bark of all these has very bitter and tonic pro- 
perties. Some of them have underground stems, dying annually down; others 
again have fine permanent stems, the wood of which is exceedingly hard, a fact 
which has given rise to the name, from cornu, a horn, the wood being believed to 
be as hard and durable as a horn. Hence the ancient Romans constructed spear 
shafts and other warlike implements from it, and Virgil alludes to it as iutia hello 
