XIII. OLACACEÆ.
Trees or shrubs, with watery juices, their stems sometimes twining, and alternate usually entire persistent leaves, without stipules. Flowers perfect or polygamous, in axillary cymes or racemes, rarely solitary; calyx 4 to 6-lobed; petals 4—6, inserted on a hypogynous disk, free or united into a campanulate or tubular corolla; stamens 4—12, inserted on the tube of the corolla; filaments free, rarely united; anthers oblong, introrse, opening longitudinally; ovary superior or partly inferior, free or immersed in the disk, 1—4-celled; styles mostly united; stigmas entire or lobed; ovules 1—3 in each cell of the ovary. Fruit drupaceous, naked or nearly inclosed in the enlarged disk, 1-celled, 1-seeded; seed pendulous; embryo minute, erect, in copious fleshly albumen; radicle superior.
Olacaceæ with twenty-five genera and a large number of species is confined to the tropics, and is most abundant in those of the Old World.
CONSPECTUS OF THE NORTH AMERICAN ARBORESCENT GENERA.
Corolla-lobes short; stamens as many as its lobes; drupe almost inclosed in the enlarged disk of the flower; branches unarmed.1. [Schoepfia.] Corolla-lobes elongated; stamens twice as many as its lobes; drupe nearly naked; branchlets armed.2. [Ximenia.]