ENGLISH, OR SMALL-LEAVED ELM. 



10; 



perfection and beauty in the southern and midland parts 

 of England, where it not only forms the avenues of the 

 finest public walks and drives in the vicinity of towns and 

 cities, and enters largely into the proportion of the trees 

 which surround the residences and adorn the parks of our 

 nobility and gentry, but is also the common and pre- 

 vailing hedgerow timber in many districts, among which 

 we need only to particularize the valleys of the Thames 

 and the Severn. In this its finest form it shows a tall, 

 spiring habit of growth, exhibiting a straight, continuous 

 trunk, to which, throughout its entire length, the branches 

 are subordinate. It grows rapidly, and often attains a height 

 of from seventy to ninety feet, with a trunk of four or five 

 feet in diameter, and this 

 size it is said frequently 

 to reach within a period 

 of a hundred years. The 

 spray of the species is light 

 and slender, the shoots 

 springing from the stem at 

 an acute angle, and in an 

 alternate manner, as shown 

 in the figure. This mode 

 of growth gives to the 

 young branches a flat or 

 fan-like form, which, how- 

 ever, becomes less appa- 

 rent as the trees gain 

 age, and as one year's 

 shoot is added to another, 

 till at length the weight 

 of the spray becomes too great for the branch to sup- 

 port it at its original angle, and it is obliged to take 



