l86 TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



22. Mr Henry's Investig-ation of Elm Seedlings.^ 



By A. D. Richardson. 



In this paper the author gives an account of some experimental 

 sowings of elm seed which he made in June 1909, and the 

 results obtained would seem to throw an entirely new light on 

 the inter-relationships of several of these trees, and may have 

 the effect of revolutionising the nomenclature of the whole 

 genus. They cannot but have far-reaching consequences in 

 connection with the question of plant-breeding as applied to 

 trees. 



The author assumes (no doubt quite correctly) that there are 

 two species of elm which occur naturally in the British Isles — 

 Ulmus monta7ia, With., the Wych, Scotch, or mountain elm of our 

 parks and woodlands, and U. glabra. Miller, which is rarely 

 found in woods, but is a common tree in hedgerows in the east 

 of England (where both species are known as Wych elm), and is 

 also somewhat prevalent in Cornwall and the south of Ireland. 

 The latter species the author regards as the elm which flourished 

 in pre-historic times in the forests of the alluvial lands now given 

 up to agriculture, and he mentions that in France, Germany, 

 Belgium and Denmark it is rare in woods, but becomes a 

 component of the forests farther south, as in the alluvial lands 

 of the Danube. The two species resemble each other in being 

 wide-branching trees, but they are quite distinct in their other 

 characters. In the former the young shoots are stout and hairy, 

 and the leaves are large, thick, very hairy, and have short 

 stalks ; in the latter the young shoots are slender and nearly 

 smooth, and the leaves are small, thin, smooth on the upper 

 surface, and have long stalks. Other distinctions are that in the 

 former the seed is in the centre of the fruit {samara), while in 

 the latter it is near the top, and the former rarely produces 

 suckers while the latter suckers freely. 



The author sowed ninety different lots of seed, and the first 

 fact established from this experiment was that only two of the 

 kinds, namely U. montana and U. glabra, gave seedlings which 

 were uniform in size and other characters. All the other kinds 

 produced seedlings of different sizes, different leaf arrangements, 

 etc. The seedlings of U. montana had unbranched stems, 



^ On Elm Seedlings showing Mendelian Results, by Augustine Henry, 

 M.A., F. L. S. F'aper read before the Linnean Society, 7th April 1910. 



