CX VII. —THE HAWTHORN. 
Cratcegiis Oxyacantha Linne. 
I T must be admitted that there are but few characters by which we can separate 
the genus Cratcsgus from Mespilus, or from the sub-genus Sorbus of the genus of 
Pyrus. It may have a single carpel, or two, or more, up to five : the core Is made up 
of distinct portions which are bony, in which it resembles rather than Sorbus, 
though its fruits are small and generally clustered, as in the latter, rather than large 
and sub-solitary, as in Apples, Pears, and Medlars. Unlike the Medlars, however, 
it has the up-grown and in-grown fleshy receptacular tube so far developed as to 
conceal, though not completely to cover, the bony segments of the core. 
Crata-gus until recently comprised some fifty species of shrubs and small trees, 
belonging to the North Temperate Zone. Recently, however, a great number of 
new species have been described by American botanists. The genus as a whole may 
be said to be generally spinous, the spines representing modified branches ; the 
leaves are simple, with deciduous stipules : the flowers are white or pink, in terminal 
corymbose cymes, pentamerous, secreting honey, and protogynous ; and there are two 
ovules in each carpel, one or both of which may remain as a seed in the bony 
divisions of the pome. Another general character is the toughness of the wood', the 
result of slow growth and complex structure, from which the name Cratagus (from 
the Greek Kparos, kratos, strength), which dates from Theophrastus, is derived. 
Our species derives its name Oxyacantha, which has been applied since the days 
of Dioscorides to such very diflFerent shrubs as the Barberry and the Sweetbriar, from 
6 ^v5, oxus, sharp ; anavda, akantha, a thorn. It reaches twenty or even thirty feet in 
height, growing either with a single stem as a small round-headed tree, or branching 
freely near the ground ; and, in either case, its branching is copious and it is very 
spinous. To this habit and its tolerance of the shears it owes its employment as 
our chief hedge-making bush from the earliest days of private property in land, 
whence it derives its names of Hawthorn and Quickset. The word “ haw ” is the 
same as “ hedge ” ; but in the north of Britain the fruits of this thorn are still 
called “ haigs,” so that it is somewhat doubtful whether the word “ hedge ” is 
derived from the name of the tree that bears the “ haws,” or whether, as is more 
probable, the fruit took its name from being borne on a hedgerow tree. Although 
it can be grown from seed, it is readily propagated by cuttings ; but perhaps gets the 
name Quickset, or “planted alive,” whether grown from seed, for cuttings, or from 
transplanted seedlings, merely as distinguished from a fence of dead timber. The 
lighter colour of its bark, a brown shading to red, as though blood coursed in its 
veins, gives it such names as the Classical Alba spina, the Old English Albespyne, the 
French Aubepine, and our modern Whitethorn, as distinguished from the Blackthorn 
or Sloe. 
