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.]
1. LIQUIDAMBAR L.
Trees, with balsamic juices, scaly bark, terete often winged branchlets, scaly buds, and fibrous roots. Leaves plicate in the bud, alternate, palmately lobed, glandular-serrate, long-petiolate; stipules lanceolate, acute, caducous. Flowers monœcious or rarely perfect in capitate heads surrounded by an involucre of 4 deciduous bracts, the staminate in terminal racemes, the pistillate in solitary long-stalked heads from the axils of upper leaves; staminate flowers without a calyx and corolla; stamens indefinite, interspersed with minute scales; filaments filiform, shorter than the oblong obcordate anthers opening longitudinally; pistillate flowers surrounded by long-awned scales, the whole confluent into a globular head; calyx obconic, its limb short or nearly obsolete; stamens usually 4, inserted on the summit of the calyx; anthers minute, usually rudimentary or abortive, rarely fertile; ovary partly inferior, of 2 united carpels terminating in elongated subulate recurved persistent styles stigmatic on the inner face; ovules numerous. Capsules armed with the hardened incurved elongated styles free above, septicidally dehiscent, consolidated by their base into a globose head; pericarp thick and woody; endocarp thin, corneous, lustrous on the inner surface. Seeds usually solitary or 2 by the abortion of many ovules, compressed, angulate; seed-coat opaque, crustaceous, produced into a short membranaceous obovate terminal wing rounded at the oblique apex.
Liquidambar with about four species is confined to the eastern United States, southern and central Mexico, Central America, southwestern Asia, middle and southeastern China, and Formosa. Liquid storax, an opaque grayish brown resin, is derived from Liquidambar orientalis Mill., a native of Asia Minor.
Liquidambar from liquidus and ambar in allusion to the fragrant juices.
1. [Liquidambar Styraciflua] L. Sweet Gum. Bilsted.
