Page:Hardwicke's Science-Gossip - Volume 1.pdf/105

1, 1865.] with curious mosses and fungi, while in spring the delicious odour—

exhaled, not only by the larch buds, but by occasional violets and primroses, gives the seclusion of the grove a perpetual charm.

But we would now direct attention to the subject of our engraving, which are some larch cones of a previous year, developed into branches, which may soon be seen budding into leaves, and growing like other branchlets on the tree. With regard to these curious productions, we may conclude that according to the theory of arrested development, the original cone was formed from the elements of a branch or twig, which after the cone was formed got a new impetus of growth, and developed the branch at the termination of the cone. In this cone, then, we may view the whole of the multiple flower of the larch as so many whorls of modified leaves, which, being no longer arrested, have resulted in the elongation of the whole into an abnormal branch, with all the elements of a fruit and branch united. This sometimes occurs with other coniferæ, more particularly the spruce, but in the latter it is seldom that the branch is so thoroughly perforated.—

—I have found the lesser broom-rape (Orobanche minor), a curious parasitical plant, with purple stem and light-brown flowers, on many of the walls of the castles of Wales and Monmouthshire, which seems a curious habitat for it, since it is supposed to grow only on the roots of other plants, as the clover, &c.; and as its seeds are not winged, it seems difficult to account for its location there. I gathered this plant on the top of Martin's Tower, Chepstowe Castsle, in 1839.—Edwin Lees.

—Truffles are found in several parts of the South Downs. The only ones I have eaten were grown at Lord Gage's, at Firle Place. His lordship informed me he had never found them except under the shade of beech-trees in his park. They are also found in Stanmer Park, and in the beech-woods of West Sussex. They are usually hunted by dogs, which so much affect this delicacy that they can only be bribed into giving it up to the hunter by a bit of raw meat. In Cartwright's "History of the Rape of Bramber," 1830, p. 73, is the following statement:—"The beech-woods in this parish (Patching) are very productive of the truffle. About forty years ago (circa 1790), Wm. Leach came from the West Indies with some dogs accustomed to hunt for truffles, and proceeding along the coast from the Land's End to the mouth of the Thames, determined to fix on the spot where he found them most abundant. He took four years to try the experiment, and at length settled in this parish, where he carried on the business of truffle-hunter till his death." Pigs are occasionally used for truffle-hunting.—Mark Antony Lower, in Notes and Queries.

(Juglans regia).—In the south of England the walnut is a very common tree, not only in pleasure-grounds and gardens, but by the wayside in retired villages, as at Tickenham, Somersetshire, and ripens its dainty fruit every year freely and abundantly. In the north it is rather rare, and found chiefly near old halls, and other residences of note, and the fruit cannot be depended upon. Raised from seed, it begins to bear at ten years old, and every year, as it approaches maturity, it increases in productiveness. The tap-root is unusually strong, and gives the tree a powerful anchorage, so that it is less liable to be torn up by tempests than any other. There is good reason to believe that this tree has been in England since the time of the Romans, from whom it received the name of Juglans, or Jupiter's nut, in contradistinction to acorns and beechmast.—Grindon's British and Garden Botany.

—In ferns and their allies the result of germination is the production of a cellular expansion of various forms, whether globose or scale-like or irregular, whether more or less differentiated and distinct from the spore itself, or confluent with it externally or internally or both, on which or within the substance of which, at least in the more normal cases, two organs are produced of different sexes, the one of which, called an "archegonium," consists of a pitcher-shaped cyst, within which there is a single free cell at the base, which is destined, after impregnation, to produce, first an embryo, and then, by continued development, a perfect plant like the parent; which either once only, or annually through a shorter or longer succession of years, gives rise to fruit, consisting of a sporangium filled with spores, destined after germination to go through the same circle of phenomena. In some cases two different kinds of spores are produced, one of which rise to the male, the other to the female organs.—Berkeley's Handbook of British Mosses.