202 TUMOURS OF EUCALYPTS AND ANGOPHORAS, 



Mallees present, those who came after him might have been 

 induced to follow his lead, and to extend his incomplete observa- 

 tions. Even what he actually says ought to be sufficient to make 

 anyone cautious about identifying the persistent basal inflation 

 of the Mallees as a " rootstock," without first investigating the 

 transient basal inflations of such Non-Mallees as have them. 



Unfortunately his excessive reticence obscured what merit 

 his observations may have; and his successors, in attempting to 

 explain the make-up or constitution of the Mallees, either 

 adopted Mr. Tepper's idea that the Mallees have " rootstocks," 

 without offering any explanation of their peculiarities; or else 

 they make use of one or other of the older definitions, which, 

 though excusably deficient when they were first offered, are now 

 out of date. 



As far as we can ascertain, Mr. Maiden is the only writer who 

 has taken any notice of Tate's statement quoted above. On the 

 first page of his "Critical Revision of the Genus Eucalyptus " 

 (1903), the author gives substantially Tate's views, almost in the 

 original words, but without any comment other than " This 

 classification is chiefly of practical use in Professor Tate's own 

 State (South Australia) and in Western Australia." 



In Plate 57, fig. 12 (of Vol. ii.) of the same work (1911), an 

 illustration of a young seedling of E. paniculata, with a pair of 

 axillary stem-nodules still unfused, will be found. 'J his, we 

 belie^e, is the only illustration of a Eucalypt seedling with stem- 

 nodules, or any stage of them, which has hitherto been published. 

 In the explanation of the Plate (p. 131), fig. 12 is referred to as — 

 " Bulbous swelling in seedling This swelling is very com- 

 mon in seedlings belonging to this genus, and the cause has not 

 been investigated so far as I am aware. It is presumably to be 

 attributed to the action of bacteria." Allowing for the fact that 

 there is a pair of independent, bulbous swellings, and not merely 

 one, and that they are the first stage in the formation of Tate's 

 transient basal inflation of a Non-Mallee, we agree with Mr. 

 Maiden that they are presumably attributable to the action of 

 bacteria. But we should say exactly the same about a similar 

 seedling of a Mallee, with the first pair of axillary nodules or 

 bulbous swellings present. 



