226 



SCIENCE-GOSSIP. 



LEAF-LIKE TIMBER STAINS. 

 By John T. Carrington. 



COME time ago the late Arthur B. 

 ^ Winstone, gave me a section of what 

 appears to be either a young sycamore or 

 horse-chestnut tree, about seven inches in 

 diameter, which was found, when cut down, 

 to be curiously stained in a leaf-like pattern, 

 as depicted in the upper figure on this page. 

 The wood is perfectly solid and healthy 

 looking, and the odd part of the stain is, that 

 it apparently ran the whole length of the 

 tree with equal intensity, much after the 

 manner of the ' ' oak tree ' ' seen in the stem 

 of our common bracken when a section is 

 cut through. Mr. Winstone told me that 

 the tree was grown near Cambridge, and 

 some slices about two inches thick had been 

 obtained by Mr. Clay of that town, who had 

 given him specimens and such particulars as 

 he possessed about them. 



Beyond valuing this piece of timber as a 

 remarkable coincidence between the stain 

 and the shape of a sycamore leaf, I 

 thought little more about the specimen 

 until last winter Mr. Goldney Willis, of 

 Indianford, Manitoba, then residing at Leatherhead 

 in Surrey, brought me, without knowing any- 

 thing about the Cambridge example, a similar 

 section of wood, about an inch larger in diameter, 



taken from a plane-tree which had died and then 

 been cut down in his father's garden at Leather- 

 head. Just as in the Cambridge tree, the stain, 

 which is drawn in the lower figure, ran the whole 

 length of the trunk. In this case 

 the centre of the wood within 

 the stain is decayed, apparently 

 through the action of a fungoid 

 growth. 



Although one must reluctantly 

 think that these stain shapes are 

 only accidental, and have nothing 

 whatever to do with the shape of 

 the leaves of the tree in the stem 

 of which they occurred, the coinci- 

 dence seems most remarkable. 

 Last summer I showed the speci- 

 mens to Mr. Carruthers, F.R.S., 

 the head of the botanical depart- 

 ment of the British Museum, who, 

 though he had never before seen 

 a like case of staining in nature, 

 agreed with me that it was only 

 accidental in each tree. Blurs 

 and smudges of colour are not 

 infrequent in sections of timber, 

 specimens being on view in 

 the botanical galleries at South 

 Kensington, but definite patterns 

 are rare. 



