170 CYPRESSES AND JUNIPERS 
enough to create dismay amongst the ranks of the 
most undaunted of tree-history students. Like the 
historic miller of the Dee, he begins to feel he cares 
for none of them, ‘‘ no, not he.” 
What there is in the organism of their nature that 
permits this unfaithfulness to tradition, and allows 
them licence to produce all this confusion in growth 
and consequent confusion of mind in our midst, we 
hazard no explanation. The tree certainly seems to 
assume as many shapes as a genie in an Arabian 
Night story. Scientists, when they speak of it, call 
it polymorphous, and in tones of apology, or some- 
times, in tones of appreciative satisfaction, refer to 
the vagaries of descent that this tree offers to the 
world at large and the Mendelian world in particular. 
Some of these freaks in descent—so reads their 
unstable history—are columnar, some fastigiate; | 
some pendulous, some spreading, some dwarf, -in 
habit. But this is not all; of the coloured varieties, 
some are globose, some are plumose, and the rest of 
them are too many in number and too various of 
nature to narrate of further here. One immoral 
lesson to be learnt from their multitudinous ubiquity 
is, that the venturesome man, minded to pose as 
bene doctus upon questions of tree lore, has only, 
when in doubt upon any Cypress identity, to answer 
Lawson. Not invariably, but on many occasions 
he will be quite apt to have answered correctly. And 
your assurance will be relying on firmer foundations 
if you have made sure of the existence of those white 
linings on the under-side leaves that we have called’ 
attention to. 
A rather curious translation of the Greek word 
xbmpos occurs in Liddell and Scott’s celebrated Greek 
Lexicon, which made a first apparition in 1845 “as a 
tree growing in Cyprus, now called Lawsonia Alba.”’ 
The date of the introduction of our Cypress in 
