THE WITCH-HAZEL, SOREEL TREE, ETC. 6T 



veins are straight and depressed, so that the leaf ap- 

 pears somewhat corrugated, and the surface is more or 

 less covered (when young) with down. The flowers 

 appear just as the leaves are turning from a dark green 

 to a golden yellow spotted with brown a,nd olive. If 

 a single blossom is disentangled from the tousled but 

 pretty little cluster of yellow flowers on the brown 

 twigs, the figure with a little straightening out will 

 look hke my sketch at A. On these twigs also appear 

 the twin seed-pods left from last year's flowers ; these 

 have a fashion of suddenly bursting when the seeds 

 (polished little flattened brown pellets) are ripe, and 

 ejecting their contents many yards away.* Thirty 

 feet is no exaggerated estimate of the distance, al- 

 though in my own experience I do not remember 

 having seen a seed fly more than twelve feet. But 

 Mr. "William Hamilton Gibson has put the matter to 

 a thorough test, so I quote what he says : " My experi- 

 ments wdth the pods upon a long piazza and else- 

 where proved that the momentum of the seed would 

 commonly carry it to a distance of twenty feet, often 

 over thirty feet, and in one or two instances the 

 diminutive double-barreled howitzers succeeded in 



* " The seed is discharged by a contraction of the edges of 

 the valves of bony endocarp" (inner lining of the seed-pod), 

 " which in opening suddenly frees it by pressure and causes it to 

 fly upward." — Silva of North America, V. S. Sargent. 



