Page:Enquiry into plants (Volume 1).pdf/275

 in taste; the round fruits are generally more fragrant and sweeter, the oval ones are often sour and less fragrant. The leaves in both grow attached to a long fibrous stalk, and project on each side in a row like the feathers of a bird's wing, the whole forming a single leaf but being divided into lobes with divisions which extend to the rib but each pair are some distance apart, and, when the leaves fall, these divisions do not drop separately, but the whole wing-like structure drops at once. When the leaves are older and longer, the pairs are more numerous; in the younger and shorter leaves they are fewer; but in all at the end of the leaf-stalk there is an extra leaflet, so that the total number of leaflets is an odd number. In form the leaflets resemble the leaves of the 'fine-leaved' bay, except that they are jagged and shorter and do not narrow to a sharp point but to a more rounded end. The flower is clustering and made up of a number of small white blossoms from a single knob. The fruit too is clustering, when the tree fruits well; for a number of fruits are formed from the same knob, giving an appearance like a honeycomb. The fruit gets eaten by worms on the tree before it is ripe to a greater extent than that of medlar pear or wild pear, and yet it is much more astringent than any of these. The tree itself also gets worm-eaten, and so withers away as it ages; and the worm which infests it is a peculiar one, red and hairy. This tree bears fruit when it is quite young, that is as soon as it is three years old. In autumn, when it has shed its leaves, it immediately produces its winter-bud-like knob,