SCIENCE-GOSSIP. 



'45 



AN OAK SEEDLING. 



The Structure and Development of an Oak Seedling. 

 By Sophia Armitt. 



'TPHE autumn of 1S93 brought an unusual number 

 of acorns in the woods round Harrogate, 

 as elsewhere in England ; the ground under the 

 trees was covered and concealed by them. In the 

 lake country, further north, they were not quite so 

 numerous, but still much more abundant than I 

 had known them before. I had been reading, 

 about that time, some pleasant little books of Mrs. 

 Brightwen's, " Wild Nature won by Kindness," 

 and " More about Wild Nature," wherein she tells 

 that she had acorns and beech-mast collected for 

 the winter feeding of the many wild birds she 

 enticed to her garden and windows, by supplying 

 them with suitable food. There was little or no 

 beech-mast that year, even for the squirrels that 

 haunted the beech-trees and raced round the house 

 from the trees on one side to those on the other, 

 sometimes taking a peep in at the windows as they 

 passed. I 

 gathered to- 

 gether a pile 

 of acorns and 

 stored them 

 for similar 

 use. I don't 

 know how 

 Mrs. Bright - 

 wen managed, 

 but no birds 

 ever came to 

 my acorns, 

 the rooks even 

 did not take 

 them ; yet we 

 have success- 

 fully fed 

 many small 



birds through many winters : robins, chaf- 

 finches, hedge-sparrows, blackbirds, blue-titmice, 

 great-tits, cole-tits, and even once a marsh 

 titmouse. There have always been certain birds 

 in sight of the windows that have never been 

 tempted by human offerings, the tiny wrens that 

 search the outside crevices of the window-frames 

 for spiders, and sleep in the verandah nooks, 

 will not notice bread, or fat, or grain. Thrushes, 

 too, will turn over leaves under laurels within 

 sight of the window in search of food, without 

 approaching further. This has always puzzled 

 me, as in towns thrushes are comparatively 

 tame, and will often feed upon scattered crumbs 

 with other birds. There are the long-tailed tits and 

 the bulfinches and others, but I am running on too 

 long about the birds, I must apologise and return 



Fig. 1. — Sections of acorns in three places, at right-angles to one another. 

 1, transverse; 2, longitudinal in the plane of the cotyledons ; 3, across the plane 

 of the cotyledons; r, cotyledons; f, testa; p, pericarp; s, scar ; r, radicle; 

 pi, plumule. The embryonic tissue is at r and pi. The dots in 1 and the veins in 

 2 and 3 are the vascular bundles. (Copied.) 



to the acorns which the birds would not accept. 

 As I picked up the acorns I noticed that some 

 had already split their shells and that a tiny- 

 radicle was emerging. When [ turned over the pile 

 later on to throw some to the birds, I found that 

 many of the lower ones had sprouted and sent out 

 radicles an inch, two inches, and some even six 

 inches long. This was rather surprising, as I had 

 thought that these large fruits lay dormant all 

 winter, while necessary changes took place in 

 their stored-up food-stuffs, but here were many 

 acorns with long protruded radicles, some two 

 months after my picking them up from under their 

 parent tree. I thought this a good occasion to 

 watch the unfolding embryo life of a great tree, and 

 placed some of the finest of the germinated acorns 

 in the little acorn glasses that are like miniature 

 hyacinth glasses, with the young root in water, and 



placed them 

 in a sunny 

 window. So 

 situated, I 

 watched their 

 development 

 with interest 

 for nearly a 

 year. The 

 books certain- 

 ly say that in 

 a state of 

 nature the 

 acorns lie on 

 the ground 

 among the 

 fallen leaves 

 during winter 

 without any 

 apparent change. That they may even lie so 

 for nearly a year, that they require a period of rest 

 before the oxygen of the air and the moisture of 

 the soil are effective in making them germinate, 

 that some molecular or chemical changes must 

 take place in the living cells before further activity, 

 is possible. It has been supposed that until certain 

 ferments have been prepared in the cells, the pro- 

 toplasm is unable to make use of the stored-up 

 food materials, and therefore to initiate the changes 

 necessary for growth. Then, it is usually said, as 

 the temperature rises in the spring, the embryo in 

 the seed absorbs water and oxygen and swells, the 

 radicle drives its tip through the ruptured invest- 

 ments of the seed, and turning downwards, plunges 

 into the soil. This must, of course, be the case 

 usually, but in the autumn of 1S93, things went 



