HEATHS — continued. 
of calcareous soil evinced by Calluna ; and, though often flourishing in very poor 
sand, in most exposed upland situations, prefer a peaty soil. The decay of their 
fallen leaves adds indeed the black humus to the sands, which are often deprived of 
their iron by the humus-acids generated by these plants, and so converted from 
ochreous into grey and silver sands, the dissolved iron accumulating below in the 
moorband ironstone “ pan,” which often retains the acidity of forest and moorland 
swamps. The Cross-leaved Heath ( E . Tetralix Linne) is characteristic of wetter 
situations than the Fine-leaved E. cinerea Linne, often sharing an acid bog with 
Sundew, Bog Asphodel, and Cotton-grass ; but all species apparently depend for 
their supply of water and nitrogenous food upon the association of their roots with 
a mass of thread-like fungus or “mycorhiza,” which in this case is “ endotrophic,” 
actually penetrating the roots with which it is symbiotically associated. It has been 
experimentally demonstrated that this association is beneficial to the Heaths. 
The leaves are whorled, minute, narrow, inrolled, and rigid, those of E. cinerea 
in whorls of three and glabrous, those of E. Tetralix in whorls of four, from which 
it takes its names, and fringed with long and often glandular hairs. The latter 
species is generally very pubescent. The presence of short, leafy, axillary shoots 
often misleads the tyro as to the number and arrangement of the leaves. 
The flowers of most species are bell- or barrel-shaped and pendulous, the stigma 
projecting at the mouth of the corolla, so as to be first touched by the bees, the 
chief insects which come for the copious honey. This is secreted by a hypogynous 
disk. There are two or three bracts upon the short pedicels, and the whole genus 
exhibits the general reduction of the number of parts in the floral whorls to four. 
The dead corolla, fading to blue, to grey, and then to drab, persists into winter ; 
and one of the most impressive passages in Mr. Hardy’s “ Return of the Native” 
describes the “ worn whisper, dry and papery,” like “ the ruins of human song 
which remain to the throat of four-score and ten,” made by the November winds 
on Egdon Heath in these “ mummified heath-bells . . . washed colourless by 
Michaelmas rains and dried to dead skins by October suns.” While the crimson 
flowers of the more abundant E. cinerea are borne in a long dense raceme of whorls, 
the larger delicately blushing bells of E. Tetralix are collected in a terminal umbel ; 
and while the narrower-mouthed flowers of E. ciliaris , E. vagans , and E. mediterranea 
have no awns to their anthers, the two wider-mouthed species here represented both 
have them. The eight radiating awns in E. cinerea are toothed along one side ; but 
those of E. Tetralix are merely subulate. The pubescence so general in E. Tetralix 
extends to its ovary, while that of E. cinerea is glabrous. Throughout the genus the 
capsular fruit bursts loculicidally and septifragally, so that each of the four valves 
carries away a median septum. Both these species occasionally occur with white 
flowers. 
