HORSE-CHESTNUT FAMILY 
within its scales the Jeaves and flowers of the coming 
year. 
These buds are gummy and resinous all the time, but 
when February comes and spring is in the air, they feel its 
influence afar and glisten and glitter in the sunlight. When 
the warm days really come the resinous coats drop off and 
the leaves—tiny, downy, green babies, done up in woolly 
blankets—come out with infancy written on every line of 
their drooping surfaces. 
The gray hoss-chestnut’s Ieetle hands unfold 
Softer’n a baby's be at three days old. 
Not until they are full grown are they able to hold them. 
selves horizontal. The growth of the leaves and shoots is 
extremely rapid. 
The flowers of the Horse-chestnut are superb, and a fine 
tree in full bloom isamaguificent sight. The flower clusters 
are what the botanists call a thyrsus. When a single flower 
stands upon its own stem it is said to be solitary. When 
this stem becomes a central axis and bears smaller stems 
along its length the result is a raceme. When these sec- 
ondary stems themselves branch, the raceme becomes a 
panicle, and when this panicle stiffens and holds itself erect 
it becomes technically a thyrsus, A well-known example is 
the flower cluster of the common lilac. 
It is always a surprise that there should be so few nuts 
produced from such an abundance of bloom, for in spite of 
all this floral display each cluster produces but two or three 
fruit balls, and some of them not any. ‘The reason is that 
very few of these flowers are fertile, the most of them have 
stamens only, with an aborted pistil which cannot produce 
fruit. The fertile blossoms are at the base of the cluster. 
The round, prickly, fruit balls split open when autumn 
comes and show themselves to be lined with a strong white 
covering ; they are partitioned in the middle and contain 
two nuts, which look in color, markings, and polish for all 
the world like a bit of well-rubbed mahogany. 
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