NEAR AMBERLEY. 17 



part of the plant. The usual arrangement is the spiral. As 

 a poet beautifully puts it, " Each leaf climbs up its jewelled 

 winding stair." If a thread is drawn round a twig of one of 

 our fruit or forest trees from the base of one leaf to the base of 

 the next, and so on to the base of each following leaf, it will des- 

 cribe a spiral line ; the spiral ending with the leaf directly above 

 the one from which it commenced. We can see that the leaves 

 are thus prevented from interfering with each other by excluding 

 light and air, or otherwise impeding each other. This arrangement 

 of the leaves with regard to their placement on the stem is called by 

 botanists, phyllotaxis (from <pvX\ov, a leaf, and rd^ig, arrangement), 

 and it may be expressed in fractions of which the numerator indi- 

 cates the number of turns of the spiral forming the circle; while the 

 denominator expresses the number of leaves on that circle. Thus 

 in the oak there are two turns and five leaves ; the fraction I will 

 therefore represent the phyllotaxis of that tree There is the same 

 spiral arrangement in the blossom, only here instead of being drawn 

 out as in the foHage, it is compressed like the rings of a spiral 

 spring that has been pressed down at one end. I have read in 

 one of Hugh Macmillan's delightful books that the angles at which 

 the leaves of the plants diverge as they grow from the stem, express 

 Euclid's idea of the problem of inscribing a regular pentagon in 

 a circle. Those w^ho care to follow out this interesting subject for 

 themselves will find that in different species the number of turns 

 made round the stem in completing the cycle differs, but that both 

 the nature of the spirals and the number of leaves are always 

 determined. 



To return to the Amberley flora ; I found the AlUwn ursinum 

 very plentiful in most of the woods, and very tantalising too, some- 

 times, when I took them from a distance to be a bed of the Con- 

 valleria majalis. The latter lovely flower grows very plentifully 

 in woods above Selsley Hill, but whether truly wild there I cannot 

 say. I was much pleased to find fine specimens of the rare Paris 

 quadrifolia in the woods at Longfords. I had not found it in 

 England before, though specimens had been given me from Derby- 

 shire. It used to grow wild near Cambridge, but has now been 

 quite exterminated. May it long five and flourish in the Glouces- 

 tershire woods ! Paris comes from the hsitmj^ar, because all the 



VOL. IV. c 



