84 



THE YOUNG NATURALIST. 



some authors, so called from the Amentum or catkin in which the staminate 

 flowers are produced. This order includes the oak, beech, chesnut, &c. The 

 hazel is called a Monoecious plant, because the stamens and pistils are not 

 together as in ordinary blossoms, but are borne on different portions of the 

 young twigs. The flowers of the hazel are curious studies, both from their 

 structure and the long time they require for their full developement. In 

 autumn, when the leaves begin to drop off and leave the branches naked and 

 bare, at the extremities of the slender twigs may be noted numerous clusters 

 of compact, cylindrical, scaly little bodies ; these are the young catkins, which 

 if the weather be at all propitious, by the new year will have begun to lengthen 

 out, and will continue for the next three months to adorn the hedgerows and 

 copses with their yellow feathery tassels. But even such precocious bloom- 

 ing will scarcely warrant the glowing language of a contributor to a con- 

 temporary paper, published during the current month of March : " Late in 

 October, when every blossom except the road side aster has gone, what more 

 attractive than this tangled bush, with its prodigal effloresence of yellow 

 petals on every stem and leaf-stalk, giving notice to every passer by of its 

 laggard blooming, by the delightful pungent odcur which greets him while 

 yet a long way off/' One must charitably conclude that the writer is des- 

 cribing the hazel of some other clime than that of Britain, or that he claims 

 the poetic license and that his language is flowery rather than accurate. 



The catkins of the hazel which contain the stamens attain a length of three 

 inches, and every separate scale is seen to shelter eight stamens ; from their 

 pendent position each downy scale acts as a penthouse to shield the anthers 

 from the rain, and keep the powdery pollen dry so that it may be easily 

 carried by the wind to the waiting stigmas. As illustrating the prodigal 

 profusion of pollen produced by the hazel, I have counted the scales on a 

 very moderate sized catkin and found them to exceed 150, which with eight 

 stamens to each scale gives 1200 stamens in a catkin, and as there are on an 

 average at least three staminate catkins to each cluster of stigmas, that would 

 give the enormous number of 3600 stamens concerned in the production of 

 the two or three perfect nuts which are found together in autumn. As each 

 stamen contains a quantity of powdery pollen, this explains the dense clouds 

 of yellow dust which are shed by every passing breeze over a hazel wood, and 

 leads to the query " Whereunto is this waste ? " It is a notable fact that 

 almost all catkin-bearing trees produce their flowers before the leaves, so that 

 the dispersion of the pollen may not be intercepted by the foliage The pis- 

 tillate or fertile flowers of the hazel are borne in little bud-like bodies, sessile 

 upon the young trees. At first they so closely resemble the leaf-buds as to be 

 undistinguishable, but in January or February a close inspection will detect 



