SOME TORREYAS 247 



capital letters, to render the title, we can only assume, 

 more assured and enduring. 



There is so little opportunity offered to most of 

 us to form our own impartial judgment upon the 

 prowess of our olfactory capabilities, that it would 

 be perhaps presumptuous to ventilate, even faintly, 

 such an unpractised opinion upon so delicate a subject. 

 But in the case of the T. Californica, from the not 

 very exhaustive experience of only a few tries, I 

 should feel inclined to vote in favour of mitigating 

 the unsavoury impeachment. The charge of mal- 

 odour preferred against the T. Grandis, in spite of 

 the fact that the unfragrant adjectives have been 

 applied all round to the Torreyan tribe, has been 

 dismissed by some authorities. The Nucifera and 

 Taxifolia may, for all I know, fully deserve the 

 reputation. As neither the T. Grandis nor the T. 

 Taxifolia, between which some confusion seems to 

 exist, appear to be English grown — our winters 

 have proved too much for them— we need hardly 

 follow the question of their exhalations to a bitter end. 



As trees they are very rarely to be met with in our 

 country, and the T. Californica is the only species of 

 them that attains tree-form dimensions. A few only 

 are mentioned in the Trees of Great Britain, and there 

 is another unmentioned there that grows at Scorrier 

 (John Williams), Cornwall, a sizable tree, and one 

 that it is believed was brought and planted there by 

 W. Lobb in the fifties of the last century. 



On the subject of size we should add that E. Wilson, 

 in his 1914 expedition to Japan, came across a T. 

 Nucifera at Kamo, in the Satsuma Province, 93 ft. 

 high, 18 ft. in girth. 



On the question of identifying them, we have first 

 to set to work on the task of discriminating between 

 them and the Cephalotaxi. We will enumerate a 

 few of the differences. 



