NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS. 
AVych Hazel, Oaks, p. 5. — My friend Mr. Menzies, Deputy- 
Surveyor of Windsor Great Park, a great authority on forest 
trees, kindly sends me the following note : — 
The Wych Elm referred to at page 5 must have been a re- 
markably fine one, and, judging by what I knoAV of others, pro- 
bably 500 years old. The Wych Ehn is not nearly so common 
as the English Elm. The distinguishing feature of the former 
is its rough serrated leaf. The distinguishing feature of the 
English Elm, especially under fifty years of age, is the cork-look- 
ing excrescences upon the points of the branches, or, as 
Shakespeare in " Midsummer-Night's Dream " has stamped it 
past mistaking — 
" The hark II fingers of the Elm." 
The finest elms at Windsor and in the Playing Fields of Eton 
are about 300 years old, and 15 feet in circumference ; but the 
average age of an elm is about 100 years less than this. It is 
not known when the Wych Elm was introduced into Eng- 
land — if, indeed, it is not indigenous ; but it is believed the 
Pomans introduced the common elm when they brought the 
vine, as the two are always associated in the Latin poets. Mr. 
White says particularly that this Wych Elm must have been a 
'planted'' tree. He does so because there was a great con- 
troversy in his time and for many years afterwards as to whether 
trees, especially oaks and all hard-wooded trees, which have a 
tap-root in their youth, w^ould grow to any size when trans- 
planted from their original seed-bed. It has really only been 
settled within the last thirty years, that transplanting young 
trees is not of the slightest consequence if properly done, and 
that the tap-root in them all is absorbed (like a tadpole's tail) 
in a few years, and cutting it off makes no difference. No tree 
