The Museum Gazette 



Some birch twigs with catkins upon them were gathered 

 and taken home and examined. The pillar to which the 

 seeds and scales are fastened varies from J to i\ inches in 

 length. It is yellow and about the thickness of thread. The 

 stalk supporting the catkin is \ inch long, and twice as thick 

 as the pillar. It is very firmly fixed to the twig, and in 

 section is bright green. A careful counting of the seeds and 

 scales in what appeared to be a perfect catkin showed that 

 there were 75 scales and 150 ends. Thus it would appear 

 that each scale encloses two seeds. 



Very few of the oak leaves now thickly covering the ground 

 retain any spangle galls. In those that are kept we shall 

 probably fail to find a living occupant. It is not usual for 

 these galls to be retained, they generally fall many days 

 before the leaves. The large coloured cherry-like gall, on the 

 contrary, often falls with the leaf. They are not common, but 

 one may now and then be picked up. 



The round grey patches so common on the underside of 

 the brown oak leaves — sometimes two, three, or even four 

 occur on one leaf— mark the mines of the larva of a species 

 of Lithocolletis, a genus of minute moths. If the mine be 

 carefully opened with a penknife and examined with a 

 pocket lens, there will be seen in many of them the brown 

 pupa snugly ensconced in a cocoon made of its rejectamenta ; 

 the pellets being woven together with silky hairs. 



Three very conspicuous fungi may be observed on dead 

 stems of gorse and broom, especially the latter, through- 

 out January and February. The first is the well-known 

 Witch's Butter, or Yellow Jelly Sprout (Tremella mesenterica) . 

 It forms bright yellow tortuous masses about i-| inches 

 across. The second, which forms a thin, paint-like reddish 

 layer on the bark, is familiar to the mycologist under the 

 name of Peniophova incavnata. The third is an agaric, one 

 of the very few which bears a really distinctive English name. 



