A tree, 80°—90° high, with a tall trunk 2°—3° in diameter, short rather slender branches forming a comparatively narrow round-topped head, and stout branchlets, marked by small elongated pale lenticels, coated at first with hoary caducous tomentum, becoming dark brown and rather lustrous or ashy gray, or rarely pale orange color and glabrous or slightly puberulous, or covered with a glaucous bloom in their first winter, growing darker in their second year and much roughened by the large thickened leaf-scars; usually much smaller and at the north rarely more than 40° tall. Winter-buds slightly resinous, broadly ovoid, acute, with bright red-brown scales, about ¼′ long and about one half the size of the flower-buds. Bark on young trunks divided by shallow fissures into broad flat ridges separating on the surface into thick plate-like scales, becoming on old trunks ¾′—1′ thick, light brown tinged with red, and broken into long narrow plates attached only at the middle and sometimes persistent for many years. Wood dull brown, with thin lighter brown sapwood of 12—15 layers of annual growth; now often manufactured into lumber in the valley of the Mississippi River and in the Gulf states, and as black poplar used in the interior finish of buildings. Distribution. Southington, Connecticut, and Northport, Long Island, southward near the coast to southern Georgia, and the valley of the lower Apalachicola River, Florida, through the Gulf states to western Louisiana, and through Arkansas to southeastern Missouri, western Kentucky and Tennessee, southern Illinois and Indiana, and in central and northern Ohio (Williams, Ottawa and Lake Counties); in the north Atlantic states in low wet swamps, rare and local; more common south and west on the borders of river swamps; very abundant and of its largest size in the valley of the lower Ohio and in southeastern Missouri, eastern Arkansas, and western Mississippi. 4. Populus tacamahacca Mill. Balsam. Tacamahac. _Populus balsamifera_ Du Roi, not L. [Illustration: Fig. 119]