III. 1. THE HORNBEAM. 175 



tive name.* The bark is smooth, like that of a beech, and of 

 a dark bluish gray or slate color, whence it is sometimes called 

 the blue beech. 



The trunk is a short irregular pillar, not unlike the massive, 

 reeded columns of Egyptian architecture, with projecting ridges 

 which run down from each side of the lower branches. The 

 branches are irregular, waving or crooked, going out at various 

 but large angles, and usually from a low point on the trunk. 

 The recent shoots are very slender and tapering, somewhat 

 hairy, and brownish or purple. The older branchlets are of a 

 dark ashen gray with a pearly lustre. 



The leaves are very much like those of the black birch. They 

 are on short footstalks, elliptical or oblong, two to three inches 

 long and one to one and one-half broad, rounded at the base, 

 sharply and unequally serrate, smooth and slightly impressed 

 at the veins above, paler and softly hairy along the veins and 

 with a prominent tuft of hair at the axil of the veins beneath. 

 The footstalk is a little hairy ; the buds oval. The autumn 

 colors of the leaves are different shades of scarlet and crimson. 



The male catkins come out before the leaves, on the sides of 

 the branches. They are an inch or usually less than an inch 

 long, and look as if they had been stunted in their growth. They 

 are set with broad-ovate, pointed scales, within which are twelve 

 or more anthers resting by their base on short filaments. The 

 female catkins come out of the same bud with the leaves, at the 

 ends of the smaller branches, so that the fruit is in clusters ter- 

 minating a short, leafy branchlet. When mature, the compound 

 fruit-heads are on very slender footstalks of from one to two- 

 thirds their length, and consist of a series of alternate pairs 

 of transformed, sagittate leaves, growing together at base, and 

 forming each a cup enclosing an egg-shaped, eight-sided nut, in 

 a thin, dark brown, ribbed husk, crowned with the stigma. The 



* Gerard thought otherwise in regard to the derivation of this name. He says, 

 of the corresponding English species, "The wood or timber is better for arrowes 

 and shafts, pulleyes for mils, and such like devices, than elme or wich-hazell ; for, 

 in time, it waxeth so hard, that the toughness and hardness of it may be rather 

 compared to horn than unto wood; and therefore it was called hornebeam or hard- 

 beam. — Herball, p. 1479. 



