VITEX, a genus of trees or shrubs belong ing to the Verbenaceer and widelv distributed in warm climates. The leaves are opposite and are usually palmately compound with three to seven leaflets. The flowers are of medium size, with a short tube and oblique, five-cleft limb, which is sometimes slightly bilobate. They are arranged in more or less dense, branched cymes and are purple, blue, white or yellowish. The handsome, deciduous shrub, Vitex agnus-castus, native to the shores of the Mediterranean, has many popular names, such as Abraham's balm, or monk's pepper-tree, but is particularly known as the chaste-tree, or agnus-castus, from its supposition,. virtues in the way of dispelling love and preterving vir tue. Its leaves are aromatic, its sap is said to be poisonous and it is much cultivated on ac count of the paniculate cymes of bright, bluish purple flowers; it is not hardy, however, north of Philadelphia.
Several species of Vitex produce valuable wood, as, for instance, the lignum-vitx of Queensland (V. lignum-vitce) and the puriri,
or New Zealand teak (V. littorfais). This last is a robust tree, sometimes five feet in diameter, yielding short lengths, often curved, of a brown, heavy, durable timber, suitable for shipbuilding and for other purposes, and con sidered to be imperishable in water The flow ers on its spreading branches are nearly an inch long and are hairy and dull-red in color. V. capitata is the bois lezard of upper South Amenca. The evergreen, V. pubescens, and the V. umbrosa, of the West Indies, are known respectively as the tree-vitex and as the box wood or fiddle-wood. V. trifolia is latown in India as the wild pepper-tree and yields a sweet, greenish medicinal oil. The aromatic leaves of V,. negando, of the same country, are belteved to alleviate headache, and a vapor bath is pre pared from thern for the benefit of fever and rheumatism; while its ashes are largely em ployed as an alkali in dyeing.