26 



ferent sizes, wbich were clearly immature, and not ready to sprout in the following 

 spring. On examination of the smallest, he found that it grew from the end of a half- 

 dead fihre ; and recurring to the dead plant which he had first taken up, he perceived 

 that its several fibres, or at least many of them, though dead at the base, were alive at 

 the other end, and beginning to bristle or protrude young fibres near the extremity. 

 By further research, he clearly ascertained that the plant dies after flowering, but is ca- 

 pable of reproducing a new plant from the point of each of its fibres after they have 

 fallen apart, the extreme point becoming the eye or shoot, which increases in size till 

 its maturity, and the lateral bristles becoming the fibres by which the plant is to be 

 nourished and afterwards propagated. The young roots continue thus to increase in 

 bulk under ground till they come to the flowering age, when they push up vigorously, 

 die and spawn again in the same extraordinary manner." — p. 434. 



We regret that we have room for only one more extract, which is a 

 graphic description from the pen of J. F. M. Dovaston, Esq., of a re- 

 markable monoecious variety of the common yew, with pendulous 

 hi'SincheSf {Taxus baccata, var. /3. Dovastoniana, Leighton), growing 

 in that gentleman's grounds at Westfelton, near Shrewsbury, and figu- 

 red in Loudon's 'Arboretum Britannicum,' iv. 2083, fig. 1990. 



" It is about sixty years since my father John Dovaston, a man without education, 

 but of unwearied industry and acute ingenuity, had with his own hands sunk and con- 

 structed a pump ; and the soil being light, it continually fell in ; he secured it with 

 wooden bars, but foreseeing their speedy decay, he planted near to it, a Yewtree, which 

 he bought oS" a poor cobbler for sixpence, who had plucked it up from a hedge-bank 

 near Sutton; rightly j udging that the fibrous and matting tendency of the yew-roots 

 would hold up the soil. They did so ; and independent of its utility, the yew (as you 

 have to your great admiration witnessed) grew into a tree of the most striking and dis- 

 tinguished beauty ; spreading horizontally all around to a diameter of 63 feet, with a 

 single spiral leader to a great height; each branch in every direction dangling in tressy 

 verdure down to the very ground, pendulous and playful as the most graceful birch 

 or willow, and visibly obedient to the feeblest breath of summer air. Its foliage, like 

 that of the asparagus, is admirably adapted for retaining the dew-drops ; and at sun- 

 rise it would seem that Titania and a bevy of her fairies had been revelling the night 

 around it, and left their lamps in capricious frolick, so glitteringly coruscant is every 

 branch with its millions of every-coloured scintillations, as it were all a-blaze. To de- 

 scend, however, to prose : — this lovely tree has food for the mind of the philosopher, as 

 well as for the eye of the poet; for, strange to tell, and what few unseeing believed, 

 though a male, and smoking like furnace, or a very volcano, with farina to the blasts 

 of February, it has one entire branch self-productive, and exuberantly profuse in Fe- 

 male berries, full, red, rich, and luscious ; from which I have raised 17 plants, every 

 one of which already markedly partakes largely of the parents' pensility. Of these 

 seedlings several have been presented to the following friends. * * The 



remaining trees are still in my possession, and are intended to be distributed to Socie- 

 ties or persons who will undertake to plant them in situations where they are likely to 

 be preserved. Berries will also, at the proper season, be given with pleasure to such 

 persons who may be curious in these matters." — p. 497. 



The plates, 19 in number, are a somewhat novel feature in a local 



