Aromatic resinous trees and shrubs, with watery juice, terete branches, and small scaly buds. Leaves alternate, revolute in the bud, serrate, resinous-punctate, persistent in our species, in falling leaving elevated semiorbicular leaf-scars showing the ends of three nearly equidistant fibro-vascular bundles. Flowers unisexual, diœcious or monœcious, usually subtended by minute bractlets, in the axils of the deciduous scales of unisexual or androgynous simple oblong aments from buds in the axils of the leaves of the year, opening in early spring, the staminate below the pistillate in androgynous aments; staminate, perianth 0; stamens 4 or many, inserted on the thickened base of the scales of the ament; filaments slender, united at the base into a short stipe; anthers ovoid, erect, 2-celled, introrse, opening longitudinally; ovary rudimentary or 0; pistillate flowers single or in pairs; ovary sessile, 1-celled; styles short, divided into 2 elongated filiform stigmas stigmatic on the inner face; ovule solitary, erect from the base of the cell, orthotropous, the micropyle superior. Fruit a globose or ovoid dry drupe usually covered with waxy exudations; nut hard, thick-walled. Seed erect, with a thin coat, without albumen; embryo straight; cotyledons plano-convex, fleshy; radicle short, superior, turned away from the minute basal hilum. The family consists of the genus _Myrica_ L., of about thirty or forty species of small trees and shrubs, widely distributed through the temperate and warmer parts of both hemispheres. Of the seven North American species three are trees. Wax is obtained from the exudations of the fruit of several species. The bark is astringent, and sometimes used in medicine, in tanning, and as an aniline dye. _Myrica_ rubra Sieb and Zacc., of southern Japan and China, is cultivated for its succulent aromatic red fruit. The generic name is probably from the ancient name of some shrub, possibly the Tamarisk. CONSPECTUS OF THE NORTH AMERICAN SPECIES. Flowers diœcious. Leaves oblanceolate, usually acute or rarely rounded at apex, mostly coarsely serrate above the middle, yellow-green, coated below with conspicuous orange-colored glands. 1. M. cerifera (A, C). Leaves usually broadly oblong-obovate, rounded or rarely acute at apex, entire, dark green and lustrous. 2. M. inodora (C). Flowers monœcious; leaves oblanceolate or oblong-lanceolate, sharply serrate, dark green and lustrous. 3. M. californica (G). 1. Myrica cerifera L. Wax Myrtle. [Illustration: Fig. 159]