The fruit consists of radiating, somewhat woody fibres, terminating in a tuberculated and slightly papillose surface. In this fibrous mass the seeds, which are nearly as large as those of a quince, are disseminated. We cannot pretend to say what part of the fruit has been described as the "pulp which is nearly as succulent as that of an orange; sweetish, and perhaps agreeable when fully ripe." In our opinion, the whole of it is as disagreeable to the taste, and as unfit to be eaten as the fruit of the sycamore, to which it has almost as much resemblance as to the orange.
The tree rises to the height of twenty-five or thirty feet, dividing near the ground into a number of long, slender, and flexuous branches. It inhabits deep and fertile soils along the river valley. The Arkansa appears to be the northern limit of the range of the maclura, and neither on that river, nor on the Canadian, does the tree or the fruit attain so considerable a size as in warmer latitudes. Of many specimens of the fruit examined by Major Long, at the time of his visit to Red river, in 1817, several were found measuring five and an half inches in diameter.--JAMES.
[81] Pike was the first to describe as a desert the fine grazing lands of the Great Plains; Long and Pike agreed in thinking them providentially placed to keep the American people from ruinous diffusion. The myth of the Great American Desert lived for half a century.--ED.
[82] The South Fork of the Canadian is a much smaller stream than the map indicates. Its sources are in the Shawnee Hills, not far west of the ninety-sixth meridian, near those of Boggy River, a tributary of the Red.
On the sources of the North Fork, see _ante_, note 51.--ED.
[83] Journal of Travels into the Arkansa Territory, by Thomas Nuttall, &c. page 200.--JAMES.
_Comment by Ed._ See reprint of Nuttall's _Journal_, in our volume xiii, p. 265, and note 204.
[84] This tree, the populus angulata of Pursh, has received its common name from the downy cotton-like appendage to the seed, which being ripened and shed in May, or the beginning of June, is then seen floating in the air in great quantities, and often proves somewhat troublesome to the eyes and noses of persons who are much in the open air. Baron Humboldt in speaking of the unona aromatica of South America, says, "Its branches are straight, and rise in a pyramid nearly like those of the poplar of the Mississippi, falsely called Lombardy poplar." Pers. Nar. vol. v. p. 163. As far as our observation has extended, the poplar most common in the country of the Mississippi, and indeed almost the only one which occurs, is the angulata, very distinct from the populus dilatata, the Lombardy poplar of our streets and yards, which is not a native of this country. The branches of the cotton-wood tree are not very numerous, particularly where it occurs in forests, as is the case on the Mississippi, below the confluence of the Missouri, and in the alluvial lands of most of the rivers in the United States, and show less tendency to arrange themselves in a pyramidal form than those of almost any other tree. In the open country west of the Mississippi, where, in the distance of one hundred miles, some dozens of cotton-wood trees may be found scattered, their tops are peculiarly low and straggling, as is the case with individuals of the same species which have grown in open fields, and by the road sides in various places. This tree is, perhaps, as widely distributed as any indigenous to North America, extending at least from Canada to Louisiana, and from the Atlantic to the lower part of Columbia river. It is, however, so peculiarly frequent in every part of the country watered by the Mississippi and its tributaries, that it may, with as little absurdity as usually attends names referring to locality, be called the Mississippi poplar. It is probable, that nearly one half of the whole number of trees in the recent alluvial grounds or bottom-lands of the Mississippi and its tributaries, are of this species. Whether it was considered by Humboldt as identical with the Lombardy poplar of our streets, we cannot decide.