OF THE COMMON LARCH. 239 
Sir William kindly sent me a little sketch, giving an ideal longi- 
tudinal section of one of the Larch cones, so as to show how he 
conceived the stalk to continue its growth directly, and without 
any division, through the length of the cone. JI had three of 
those proliferous cones sawn through longitudinally, and the 
results (as exhibited) prove the correctness of Sir William 
Hooker’s imaginary sketch. None of the cones seem at all 
diseased, and the seeds are progressing towards their natural 
maturity. | 
Postscript.— The President of the Section (Professor Balfour) 
after the reading of my paper, remarked that he had seen, in 
some foreign work, published many years ago, an engraving 
and a notice of this proliferous Larch cone, and he thought 
that it would very probably be mentioned in De Candolle’s 
“Organographie Végétale.”’ 
Having met with a copy of this work in the Library of the 
Literary and Philosophical Society, Newcastle, I saw that fig. 3, 
in plate 86, Tome 2 (Paris, 1827), represents this smaller state 
of the Larch cone—which De Candolle terms, ‘‘monstruosité,” 
and he merely describes it as, “‘axe du cone prolongé enbranche.” 
And I may further add that, on examining the same young 
Larches, which are growing in a light gravelly soil, and which 
produced so many proliferous cones last season, I found that 
they were all this autumn (September 28rd) barren; and indeed 
I failed to detect any fresh cones of this year’s growth upon any 
of the trees, which had, nevertheless, grown well during the 
latter part of the past warm summer. 
