THE ALDER — continued. 
The live wood is white ; but when the Alder-holts are strewn in autumn with 
newly-felled stems it will be seen to turn red on exposure to the air, as if with blood, 
fading later to a permanent pale pink. It is exceptionally durable if kept either 
perfectly dry or under water, so, as Mr. Kipling writes, 
u Alder for shoes 
Do wise men choose” ; 
though, to protect them from a boring beetle, French alder sabots are hardened by 
smoking. According to ancient tradition, to which Virgil refers, Alder was the first 
materia] employed by man for boats or “ dug-outs ” ; whilst Professor Martyn 
suggested that a hollow Alder floating in a stream may have in fact given to man 
the first suggestion of a boat. Both Pliny and Vitruvius mention the use of Alder 
wood for piles, the city of Ravenna and, according to Evelyn, the Rialto at Venice 
being founded upon piles of this material. Old knotty trees have a fine curled 
grain and the colour of Mahogany, so that the tree is said to be known in Ireland 
— where it is abundant — as Irish Mahogany ; but after long immersion in peat it 
becomes as black as Ebony. 
In the angles of the larger lateral veins on the under surfaces of the leaves are 
little tufts of hair amongst which mites are often found. These have been supposed 
to devour fungus-spores which might otherwise injure the tree. 
The catkins appear before the leaves, the cylindrical male ones, then about an 
inch in length, and green, being visible at the ends of the shoots, and the short 
ovoid female ones farther back, in the preceding autumn. In February or March 
the former lengthen to two or four inches and become a dark red until their 
shield-like scales, which protect the anthers from wind and rain, have shed the pollen, 
when they become rust-colour. The female cone-like catkins, though still green, 
have become three-quarters of an inch long in autumn ; but it is not until after 
pollination that they become brown and woody. There is no rule as to the relative 
dates of maturity of stamens and stigmas. Each male catkin-scale bears three 
flowers in its axil, each with four united green sepals and four superposed stamens 
with two-chambered anthers. The scales of the female “ cone,” on the other hand, 
have each two flowers each with two bracteoles ; and when, by September or 
October, the flowers have developed into little light-brown, winged and one-seeded 
fruits, these bracteoles have united with the catkin-scale to form one of the woody 
scales of the persisting fruit-cone. Not till the following spring do these scales 
gape asunder so as to enable the winged fruitlets to be dispersed by the wind. 
