160 PROCEEDINGS OF THE ACADEMY OP [18?9. 



the disarticulation occurred. Chestnut branches several years 

 old would be found full of these scars where the buds had been ; 

 but never would be found a perfect dormant bud, except at the 

 termination of a branch, after the branch was one year old. There 

 seemed to be whole classes of trees with distinct peculiarities in 

 this respect. Leguminosse would preserve dormant buds for an 

 indefinite number of years. In Gymnocladus, the Kentucky coffee 

 tree, the axillary bud of the one year branch could be found 

 twenty years afterwards just beneath the bark, in the position it 

 first occupied, having in all that time grown just enough as the 

 tree grew to keep just beneath the surface. The same is true of 

 magnolias. In some, 3 r oung branchlets came from the axillary 

 buds the spring following their formation, and continued an ex- 

 istence as weak branchlets for a few years until starved out by 

 the stronger ones, but when they reached a flowering condition 

 the whole axillary bud died out with the effort of producing 

 flowers. This was well illustrated by some maples. There was a 

 third class which produced flowers and also an axillary bud, and 

 these continued alwa3's through life twiggy branching trees, de- 

 pending also on ultimate starvation of the branchlets to keep the 

 supply of main branches within hounds. Birches are good exam- 

 ples of this class. The chestnut seems to be the only tree which 

 takes the matter in hand in time, and keeps down a superabund- 

 ance of branchlets by a disarticulation of the buds themselves, 

 though in arbor vitres, deciduous cypress, and some others, there 

 is a disarticulation of superabundant branches after they are a year 

 or so old, in this way keeping finally but a few main branches to 

 preserve the form and permit of the functions of the head of the 

 tree. 



In the growing branch of the flowering chestnut tree the first 

 four or five axillary buds, instead of a branch or futile buds for 

 next spring, produce at once spikes of male flowers. Often the 

 two upper axillary buds remain till next spring, to run the chance 

 of being thrown off as a bud, or perchance to make a weak branch- 

 let. After these buds have been formed, a subsidiary second 

 growth is formed, and from this renewed growth another crop of 

 male flowers, at the base of which, if at all, two or three clusters 

 of female flowers appear. The first crop of wholly male flowers 

 disappears without apparently being of any service whatever in re- 

 production. It is an enormous waste of energy if the fertilization 

 of flowers be the sole end of production. In each spike there were 

 about fifty clusters, and at least five flowers in each cluster, and 

 there were about five of these precocious spikes to each branch 

 that might in the end bear two or three female flowers, or, in round 

 numbers, over one thousand male flowers to one female, and when 

 we remember that half the branches produce only the precocious 

 male flowers, there would be two thousand males to one female, 

 even under the best circumstances; but, as already noted, the 



