XX. HAMAMELIDACEÆ.
Trees or shrubs, with watery juice, slender terete branchlets, naked or scaly buds, and fibrous roots. Leaves alternate, petiolate, stipulate, deciduous. Flowers perfect or unisexual; calyx 4-parted or 0; petals 4 or 0; stamens 4—8; anthers attached at the base, introrse, 2-celled; ovary inserted in the bottom of the receptacle, 2-celled; ovules 1 or many, anatropous, suspended from an axile placenta; micropyle superior; raphe ventral. Fruit a woody capsule opening at the summit. Seed usually 1; embryo surrounded by fleshy albumen; cotyledons oblong, flat, longer than the terete radicle turned toward the hilum. The Witch Hazel family with twenty genera is confined to eastern North America, southwestern, southern, and eastern Asia, the Malay Archipelago, Madagascar, and South Africa. Of the three North American genera two are arborescent.
CONSPECTUS OF THE NORTH AMERICAN ARBORESCENT GENERA.
Flowers usually unisexual, capitate, without petals, limb of the calyx short or nearly obsolete; capsules consolidated by their base into a globose head; seed with a terminal wing; leaves palmately lobed.1. [Liquidambar.] Flowers usually perfect, with calyx and corolla; capsules not consolidated into a head; seed without a wing.2. [Hamamelis.]