CATALPA. 
39 
Butternut wood, with this exception, that the Butternut wood is of a red- 
dish hue, and is less durable when exposed to the weather. Posts of the 
Catalpa, perfectly seasoned, have recently proved to he very lasting, by 
experiments made in the United States. Such is the information which I 
have been able to collect concerning the wood of this tree : I have never 
visited the thinly inhabited regions in which it abounds. 
In the spring, if a bit of the cellular integument of the Catalpa bark is 
removed, a poisonous and offensive odor is exhaled. In a thesis supported 
at the Medical College of Philadelphia, this bark is maintained to be 
tonic, stimulant and more powerfully antiseptic than the Peruvian Bark ; 
but this thesis appears to be undeserving of the same confidence wfith the 
treatise already mentioned, concerning the Dogwood, in which the author 
affords proofs of sound and various information. I have been assured that 
the Honey collected from the flowers of this tree is poisonous, and that its 
effects, though less alarming, are analogous to those of the honey of the 
Yellow Jasmine, Geselmium nitidum. 
In the Carolinas and in Georgia the Catalpa is called Catawbaw Tree, 
after the name of an Indian tribe that formerly inhabited a large part of 
these States, and from whose territory the tree was probably first procured ; 
the name of Catalpa, adopted in the Middle Section of the United States, 
and in Europe, is perhaps a corruption of this original. The French of 
Upper Louisiana call it Bois Shavanon , from the Shavanon or Shawnee 
nation which once existed in West Tennessee, on the borders of the river 
of this, name, called by the English the Cumberland, The Catalpa has 
long been cultivated with success in Europe, though in the climate of Paris 
its young shoots sometimes suffer by the late frosts. Its rapid growth, the 
remarkable sizç of its leaves, and the beauty of its numerous bunches of 
flowers, entitle the Catalpa to a distinguished place among ornamental 
trees : but it has ceased to be rare, and is less highly esteemed than while 
it was less common. 
PLATE LXIY. 
A leaf and a bunch of flowers of the natural size. Fig. 1, Apod, Fig. 2, 
A seed. 
