418 



to regard objects that are strange to ourselves as adventitious else- 

 where. The lime, for example, is familiar to most persons only as a 

 planted tree ; many pass their whole lives without knowing or even 

 suspecting that our own woods in England spontaneously produce it, 

 and being ignorant of, and not caring to know about its geographical 

 distribution, hastily conclude it to be a stranger to the country, and 

 are with difficulty persuaded to the contrary.* 



I have been at much pains to discover a character betwixt our Eu- 

 ropean elder and that of America (S. canadensis), and believe them 

 to be hardly even varieties, though hitherto kept distinct by botanists 

 of both continents. The latter does not usually rise so high as the 

 European, and is thought to be less ligneous in texture. I have, 

 however, repeatedly found it with stout trunks from four to six inches 

 or more in diameter, the wood as hard as in the European tree. 

 The leaflets are usually, but not always, longer and narrower than in 

 our elder, and more frequently seven or nine than five, but I have 



* Mr. EL C. Watson, speaking of Tilia parvifolia, says, " we must explain its pre- 

 sent scarcity on the supposition that human operations have tended more towards ex- 

 tinguishing, than towards encouraging and diffusing the species in England." — Cybele 

 Britannica, i. p. 243. This is no douht a just remark so far as the treatment of the 

 species is concerned, for being worthless as timber, it is usually cut for brushwood, 

 and consequently seldom permitted to propagate itself in the natural way by seed. I 

 think, however, that the epithet of " scarce " is not strictly applicable to the small- 

 leaved lime ; it is rather, like the hornbean, a local than a scarce species, occurring 

 in great abundance in certain parts of Essex, Suffolk, Lincoln and Beds, and not un- 

 commonly in other counties of the south and east, though Mr. Watson would seem to 

 credit it as chiefly native to the west of England. To me it appears to form a broad 

 belt, variously interrupted, across the whole island, but with a tendency rather to an 

 eastern than a western distribution, yet belonging, doubtless, to the English and not 

 to the Germanic type. Being of little value, always kept low, and growing amongst 

 other and better known, because more esteemed trees, it is often overlooked or disre- 

 garded even by the woodmen themselves, and hence appears rarer than it really is. 

 I regret to see the dubious term of" denizen" applied to this truly British tree in the 

 excellent and most original work I have just quoted, seeing that the weight of its au- 

 thority will be used to countenance, if not perpetuate, what I am persuaded is a phy- 

 to-geographical error. Mr. Watson is doubtless right in his conjecture that the 

 typical form of the Linnaean T. europaea is our T. parvifolia. This is clear from the 

 ' Flora Suecica,' because in Sweden the small-leaved is the only native form of the 

 lime, unless, perhaps, in Scania, where, according to Fries, our T. europaea (T. vul- 

 garis, Hayne) is spontaneous, though Fries does not consider the two distinct (Corp. 

 Fl. Prov. Suec. i. Scan. p. 80), and both these and T. grandifolia were all included in 

 the ' Species Plantarum ' under T. europaea, a name which Fries retains as a common 

 designation for the two former alone. For notices of the wild lime in England, see 

 'Correspondence of Ray,' published by the Ray Society, 8vo., 1848, pp. 43 and 237. 



