HOLLY 
Lex monticola, the Mountain Holly, is another species that 
becomes a tree, but is not very generally known. It is 
found in the Catskill Mountains and 
extends southward along the Alle- 
rhanies as far as Alabama. The 
leaves do not at all suggest the pop- 
ular idea of a holly, as they are de- 
ciduous, light green, ovate or ob- 
long, wedge-shaped or rounded at 
base, serrate, acute at apex, and ut- 
terly destitute of spines or bristles. 
They vary from two to six inches in 
length. The white flowers appear in 
June when the leaves are more than 
half grown. The fruit is spherical, 
nearly half an inch in diameter and 
bright scarlet. It is a tree of re- Mountain Holly, Hex monticola. 
markably slow growth ; a specimen Bere eee 
in the American Museum of Natural History, New York, is 
five inches in diameter and shows one hundred and seven 
layers of annual growth, of which seventy-nine are sapwood. 
The genus //ex is widely distributed over the world. It 
has no representative west of the Rocky Mountains, nor 
any in Australia. But South America is rich in them, the 
West Indies alone have ten species, eastern North America 
has fourteen, India twenty-four, China and Japan over 
thirty. Europe, strange to say, has only one, but that one 
has been developed into innumerable varieties. One hun- 
cred and seventy-five species have already been noted, and 
undoubtedly there are others not yet described. 
The fossil remains which are now known give confirmation 
of the fact that plants are ever changing. The species of to- 
aay are rarely the species of a former age. The rocks tell 
us that in the early tertiary period several forms of //ex ex- 
isted in the arctic regions, 
Llex spinescens, a fossil form, is believed to be the remote com- 
mon ancestor of the American and European Christmas Hollies, 
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