Report of Meetings for 1879, by James Hardy. 47 



Swirden burn, called the Lady's walk, on their way to tbe Eail- 

 way station. This was the path by which Lady Grizel Baillie 

 (then Grizel Hume) used to visit her father at the dead of night, 

 when he was secreted in the old church, owing to his life being 

 sought after for his adhesion to Presbyterian principles, and his 

 patriotic opposition to a tyrannical government. " She at that 

 time," we are told in the narrative of her daughter, Lady 

 Murray of Stanhope, "had a terror for a churchyard, especially 

 in the dark ; but when engaged by concern for her father, she 

 stumbled over the graves every night alone, without fear of any 

 kind entering her thoughts, but for soldiers and parties in search 

 of him, which the least noise or motion of a leaf put her in terror 

 for." The lime trees by the side of this hollow were already 

 wearing the sear and yellow leaf — the lime leaf being one of the 

 earliest to assume the autumnal hue. Greenlaw was reached by 

 train. Another party returned to Marchmont House, and went 

 to Greenlaw either by conveyances or on foot by the public road. 

 Several of the hedges near Marchmont are composed of beech, 

 which on this and the previous season, have been badly blighted 

 by the beech Aphis, Aphis Fagi, L. [Phyllaphis Fagi of 

 Kaltenbach), which by extracting the sap, withers the leaves. 

 Several portions of hedge in a variety of situations, ap- 

 peared to be quite dead. On the previous autumn this was 

 pointed out by Mr Loney, and the winged insects, like little tufts 

 of down, were floating across the roads, and were very trouble- 

 some by getting into one's eyes. At a recent meeting of the 

 Scottish Arboricultural Society, at Edinburgh, on the 7th Octo- 

 ber, Mr 0. S. France, Penicuik, suggested that a prize should be 

 offered for an essay on the disease which was doing so much in- 

 jury to beech hedges. In his neighbourhood the disease first 

 appeared on the hedges in Jime last year, and this season it had 

 entirely destroyed some portions of the hedges. In October, I 

 passed a few days in the vicinity of Eoslin, not far from Peni- 

 cuik, and found the insect on nearly all the beech hedges by the 

 public roads, some of them being deprived of foliage, in con- 

 stantly recurring patches, like those at Marchmont. The disease 

 is no great mystery, if one only examined the leaves at the proper 

 period. According to Mr Walker, the viviparous wingless 

 female, which is pale green or yellow, appears on the beech be- 

 fore the end of April ; and the viviparous form in the middle of 



