292 МВ. А. HENRY ОМ ELM-SEEDLINGS 
а sporadie phenomenon * in each variety, and may be looked upon as а pecu- 
liarity of ап individual tree, not as a characteristic of a variety. Absolutely 
pure U, glabra is frequently characterised by branchlets with excessively corky 
wings ; and at Kew, where there are three young trees of the English elm, 
all suckers from an older tree, one of these is extremely suberose, Any 
characterisation of а variety of elm by suberose branchlets alone is certain to 
be erroneous. 
I need not now give the distinguishing characters of the mauy varleties of 
elms, but will pass on to the experimental sowings which I made in June 
1909. In the spring of 1909 every kind of elm produced fruit in ехсер- 
tional abundanee—due to the good weather prevalent in the autumn of 
1908, and to the fact that in the months of March, April, and May, 1909, 
the amount of sunshine in the south of England was greater than had ever 
before been recorded by the meteorologists. Т sowed + ninety different lots 
of seed. 
The first fact established is, that there are only two kinds of elms which 
give, when sown, uniform seedlings. These are the two pure species, 
U. montana and U. glabra. A box of U. montana seedlings are all uniform in 
size and other characters. The same applies to а box of U. glabra seedlings. 
Every other kind of elm when sown produeed mixed seedlings, of different 
sizes, different arrangement of leaves, &c. 
The seedling of U. glabra has a stiff, unbranched, erect stem, with all the 
leaves small in size and in opposite pairs. 
The seedling of U. montana has an unbranched stem drooping to one side, 
with large leaves, only the first two pairs of which are opposite, all the other 
leaves above being alternate. For the sake of convenience, I shall speak of 
the seedlings of this kind as “ alternate-leaved ” seedlings ў. 
The seedlings, then, of the two species are very easy to diseriminate in the 
first year ; and this fact has much facilitated our counts of the various lots of 
seedlings and the deductions that follow from these counts. 
Several sowings were made of the Huntingdon elm. The seed was taken 
from one of the trees ш Brooklands Avenue, Cambridge. This road is 
planted оп both sides with a large number of Huntingdon elms, all of the 
same age and quite unmixed with other elms. There was no possibility here 
* This is the case with Liguidambar styraciflua. Raised from the same seed, some trees 
at Kew have very corky twigs, others are perfectly smooth. 
+ Elm seed should be sown as soon as ripe in June ; and the best seedlings are obtained 
by sowing in open beds in good garden soil. Most of my plants were raised in boxes and 
were too crowded, and had not depth enough of soil to develop well. 
t When injured by frost &c., elm-seedliugs occasionally branch in the first year; and in 
such cases, in U. glabra, alternate leaves are always produced on the branches. This is in 
anticipation of the characters of the second year, when the leaves become alternate and 
remain so ever afterwards. Such branched seedlings were few in number, and in no case 
were included in our counts of the various lots of seedlings, 
