SECTION SECOND.-Trees, with flowers in heads, surrounded by whorls of colored, petal-like leaves. Sp. 6. THE FLOWERING DOGWOOD. C. flórida. L. Fruit and leaves figured in Abbott's Insects of Georgia, II, Plate 73. Represented in Audubon's Birds, in flower, I, Plate 8; in fruit, I, Plate 73; the leaves, II, Plate 122. Michaux, Sylva, leaves, flowers and ripened fruit, I, Plate 48. Bigelow's Medical Botany, Plate 28. The Flowering Dogwood is the most beautiful and showy of its genus. The flowers are very numerous, and when they are expanded in May, the tree is conspicuous at a great distance, shining through the woods, or showing like a flower among the green delicate foliage. It is a round-headed, small tree, usually twelve or fifteen feet high, but often rising to twenty-five or thirty, with a diameter of nine or ten inches. The recent shoots are of a grayish or purplish green, covered with a fine, soft, dusty down; those of the previous year are purple, marked with rings, afterwards becoming a light gray, which, in the larger branches, is closely striate with brown. The stem is rough, with short, broken ridges, produced by crooked furrows, between which the bark is sometimes divided in a somewhat regular manner into small, square, polygonal, or roundish plates. The leaves are large, four or five inches long, and two or three wide, of a round-oval form, with an abrupt, prolonged termination, and abruptly tapering at base to a short, channelled footstalk. They are entire, smooth above, with depressions at the nerves, whitish beneath, hairy along the mid-rib and veins, and with scattered, bicuspidate hairs between. In May, or the beginning of June, it is decked with a profusion of large, showy, white flowers, forming a conspicuous ornament of the early summer woods. The flowers are at the ends of the branches, supported by a club-shaped footstalk. They are twelve or more in a head, surrounded by a whorl of four large, floral leaves, usually taken for the flower and constituting its principal beauty. Each floral leaf is petal-like, nerved, obovate, wedge-shaped at base, round ed at the end, and notched by the elevation of the hard, colored point, about which is often a shade of flesh-color or purple. The individual flowers are very small, sessile, crowded on a common receptacle, with a few minute, rounded scales at their base. A calyx of one green piece, investing the ovary and ending in four obtuse teeth, contains four slender, reflexed, oblong, fugacious, greenish-yellow petals, four erect stamens with oblong anthers, and a persistent, capitate style, somewhat shorter, rising from a brownish, circular disk. The fruit is in bunches on the enlarged, club-shaped footstalk, of a bright scarlet, oblong-egg-shaped, crowned with the dark purple calyx. They are bitter and unpleasant, but, when touched by the frost, help to furnish food to the robin and other birds. that remain with us during winter. At the time of maturity, they appear in the fork of two opposite branchlets, which end in the casket-shaped flower-bud of the succeeding year. The leaves early begin to change to a purple, and turn to a rich scarlet or crimson above, with light russet beneath, or to crimson on a buff or orange ground above with a glaucous purple beneath. These, surrounding the shining scarlet bunches of berries, make the tree as beautiful an object at the close of autumn as it was in the opening of summer. The Flowering Dogwood is of slow growth, and the wood is hard, heavy and solid, of a fine, close texture, and susceptible of a beautiful polish. It is often called box-wood, and is employed as its substitute, and for the handles of chisels, hammers, and other instruments, and for the cogs of wheels, and other articles made by the turner. The bark is very bitter, with something of an aromatic taste. According to Dr. Bigelow, it acts on the human system as a tonic, an astringent and an antiseptic, approaching in its effects to the character of the Peruvian bark. For this it has been substituted and employed with great success in the treatment of intermittent and other fevers. From the bark of the smaller roots the Indians obtained a good scarlet color. The smaller branches, stripped of their bark and used as a brush, are said to render the teeth extremely white. SECTION THIRD.-Plants with herbaceous stems, and flowers in A handsome, humble plant, growing in low, damp woods and in swamps, conspicuous in May and June for its showy, white flowers, and in autumn for its round bunches of red berries. Stem simple, erect, or ascending, four to six inches high, from a creeping root, square, the membranous projection of the angles formed by the decurrent base of the leaves. Leaves opposite, in alternate pairs. Near the root they are thin, narrow, clasping, membranous. At the surface is a pair of bract-like, purplish, pointed scales, with veins of deeper purple, one quarter to half an inch long. Above is a larger pair, and at the top is a pair still larger, in whose axils are two pairs of smaller leaves. All these upper ones are nearly sessile, rhomboidal, tapering rapidly to a point at each extremity, entire, ribbed or veined, somewhat hairy above, shining and of a lighter green beneath. Flowers numerous, very small, in a terminal umbel, surrounded by four, white, roundish, rhomboidal, or broad-ovate, pointed, nearly sessile, expanded bracts, resembling petals. Calyx with four, minute teeth. Corolla with four, oblong, pointed, revolute segments. Stamens four, diverging, bearing white anthers. Style as long as the stamens, purple, surrounded by a dark purple disk. The scarlet berries are well known to children, being pleasant, but without much taste. They are sometimes made into puddings. But their chief value is to the birds, as they seem not to be affected by the frost, and remain on the stem into the winter. FAMILY XXIII. THE WITCH HAZEL FAMILY. HAMAMELA CEE. LINDLEY. A family embracing shrubs of Madagascar, Japan, the Cape of Good Hope, China, and North America; an iron-wooded tree of Persia and the Caucasus; a poplar-like tree of India, and a tree with the aspect of a cherry-tree, of Assam. Alternate, deciduous feather-veined leaves; a bark often sprinkled with stellate pubescence; deciduous stipules; small axillary, or terminal white or pale yellow flowers; a calyx four- or five-cleft; petals sometimes wanting, sometimes four or five, spirally convolute in the bud, alternate with the calyx-segments, linear, deciduous; eight or ten stamens, four or five fertile, alternate with the petals, with anthers opening with a valve sometimes deciduous, four or five scale-like and sterile, (perhaps petals); ovary, adhering to the calyx, two-celled, with usually solitary seeds, and two styles; a leathery or woody, two-beaked, twocelled capsule, are its characteristics. A single American genus, Fothergilla, wanting petals, has fragrant flowers, with numerous fertile stamens. Properties unknown. There is a single genus in Massachusetts. THE WITCH-HAZEL. HAMAMELIS. L. Involucre three-leaved, three-flowered. Calyx deeply fourparted, invested with two to four roundish scales. Petals four, linear; stamens four, alternate with the petals; anthers opening with a lid; scales four, opposite the stamens; capsule woody, two-horned, with one black, shining seed in each of the two cells, opening at top by two elastic valves. Flowers sterile or fertile on one or different plants. THE COMMON WITCH-HAZEL. H. Virginiana. L. Figured in Barton's Flora, III, Plate 78. Catesby's Birds, Plate 102. "The variegated appearance of the American forests during the months of autumn," says Dr. Bigelow, Fl. 61, "has been repeatedly noticed by travellers. Among the crimson and yel low hues of the falling leaves there is no more remarkable object than the witch-hazel, in the moment of parting with its foliage, putting forth a profusion of gaudy, yellow blossoms, and giving to November the counterfeited appearance of spring. It is a bushy tree, sending up a number of oblique trunks, about the size of a man's arm or larger." The union, on the same individual plant, of blossoms, fading leaves, and ripe fruits, not very common in any climate, and occurring in no other instance in ours, led Linnæus to give to this American plant, a Greek name significant of the fact of its producing "flowers together with the fruit." The witch-hazel is usually found within or on the borders of moist woods, or among the scattered trees and shrubs which often clothe the steep banks of small streams. It rises to the height of from ten to twenty feet. In Essex woods, Mr. Oakes pointed out to me one which exceeded twenty-two feet, and was ten inches in circumference. The stem, which is seldom erect, is covered with a brownish, ash-colored, rather smooth bark; the branchlets of a lighter brown, with orange dots. The branches are long and pliant, with an upward curvature. The secondary branches are regularly alternate and lateral, those at the distance of one third its length from the end of a branch being longest. The leaves are lateral and alternate, or collected in tufts on the ends of the branches. They are on very short foot-stalks; irregularly obovate or rhomboidal, inequilateral, the lower side larger, lower on the stalk and halfheart-shaped, the upper side narrower, and rounded or wedgeshaped at base; acuminate, irregularly toothed or sinuate, the four or five principal veins on each side forming large teeth, downy, at last smooth above, with a ferruginous, stellate pubescence on the mid-rib, footstalk and veins beneath, the upper surface a dull green, the lower brighter and more shining. Stipules lanceolate, acute, coriaceous, half as long as the footstalk, which is one fourth or one third as long as the leaf. At the time when the flowers are expanding, the leaves become of a delicate leather yellow. The flower-buds are already formed in August. The flowers expand, sometimes as early as September, or as late as |