Winter-buds small, short, obtuse or pointed, plump and free, arranged singly or in clusters; leaf-scars usually prominent; flowers appearing with or after the leaves, showy, an inch across, white; borne in dense or scattered, very scaly clusters and in twos, threes and fours on one-year-old wood; pedicels from a half to an inch and a half in length, slender, green and glabrous; calyx-tube obconic, glabrous, green or tinged with red; calyx-lobes broadly obtuse or acute, glabrous on both surfaces, reflexed, margin serrate, faintly red; petals white, roundish or oval to obovate, entire or crenate, sessile or nearly so; stamens about thirty, filaments one-fourth of an inch in length; anthers yellow; pistils about as long as the stamens, glabrous. Fruit roundish-oblate or cordate, sides slightly compressed, about three-fourths of an inch in diameter; suture lacking or indistinct; cavity well marked, usually abrupt; apex usually depressed; color from light to dark red; dots numerous, small, russet, more or less conspicuous; stem slender, from a half-inch to two inches in length, glabrous, without bloom; skin usually separating readily from the pulp; flesh dark red, with dark colored juice or pale yellow with colorless juice, tender, melting, sprightly, more or less acidulous, sometimes astringent; stone free or more or less clinging, roundish, pointed or blunt, smooth, less than a half inch in diameter; ventral suture usually ridged, sometimes smooth. The numerous synonyms of _Prunus cerasus_ indicate the state of confusion which prevails in the scientific nomenclature of the Sour Cherry. Yet the names given are scarcely a tithe of those that have been discarded or superseded for a whole or a part of this species by botanists. Happily, there is no language in which there is a possibility of confusing the Sour Cherry with the other two or three species of cultivated cherries if the common names be used. That men, learned or unlearned, speaking in their mother tongues distinguish species of cherries so readily by their common names, is ample excuse for not attempting to give in a pomological work all of the Latin names of the Sour Cherry that have been used by the many men who have at one time or another attempted to classify the plants in Prunus. Those here published are from botanists who have contributed most to the knowledge of the species.