3°9 



THE HAZEL (CORVLUS AVELLANA). 



P. Q. KEEGAN, L L. D . , 



Patterdale, Westmorland. 



It may be owned and said that the Hazel bush or a small 

 shrubbery of Hazel bushes is specially attractive to the juvenile 

 spirit. The quite peculiar and eminently remarkable tufted and, 

 so to speak, ' concentrated ' manner in which it throws out its 

 branches and shoots coupled with the lavish vestiture of its 

 foliage, not to mention the edible quality of the fructification, 

 contribute a spectacle which no young- eye may overlook. Natural 

 steeps, or damp hollows seamed by a bubbling beck, somehow 

 acquire aspects of picturesqueness and witchery from a copse- 

 wood of Hazels. I propose, therefore, as a memorial of old 

 days, to present a brief structural and physiological account of 

 this interesting shrub, passing in successive review the axial 

 organs (stern, root, etc.), the foliar organs (leaves), and the 

 reproductive organs (flower, fruit). 



Stem and Root. — The wood is only of medium hardness 

 and weight (specific gravity 0*62 to 073), compact, homo- 

 geneous, with regularly circular growth, uniformly white, and 

 with no distinction between alburnum and duramen save where, 

 in oldish specimens, a physiological alteration or tannic de- 

 generation attacks the central part, which then turns brownish- 

 red. The medullary rays (macro) are seemingly of unequal size 

 — some very thin, the others very thick and sparser, but (micro) 

 really formed of very thin rays alternating with narrow plates 

 (sometimes only one plate) of fibrous tissues free from vessels 

 (false rays) ; the vessels are apparently equal and hardly larger 

 or more numerous in the inner (spring) wood than in the outer 

 (autumn) wood of the annual ring, are either isolated or in 

 radial files of 2 to 12, and have simple pits and no scalariform 

 thickening ; the fibres are the predominant element of the wood 

 and have very thick walls, and are associated with parenchyma 

 describing very fine and indistinct concentric zones ; the annual 

 rings are sharply defined by the interposition betw een them oi 

 a thin layer of closely appressed fibres. In the bark there is 

 next the wood a close-set medley of thin-walled parenchyma and 

 sieve-tubes, traversed by very fine, nearly straight medullary 

 rays; outwards some large stone-cells (sclerbblasts) occur with 

 large crystals, and a single bundle of stoutish fibres surrounds 

 the whole vascular bundle in a ring; a collenchyma and a phello 

 derm are found within the periderm, which latter, in (he voung 



1902 October i. 



