Ii8 
NATURAL HISTORY QUERIES. 
19 . Hedgehog. — Can any of your readers tell me whether it is the practice 
of hedgehogs to throw themselves inverted upon apples lying on the ground, so 
as to impale them with their spines, and then to rise and carry them off on their 
backs? I think Pliny alludes to this habit, but I fancy it is not credited by 
modern naturalists ? However, my gardener declares that he has seen the feat 
performed in an orchard hard by ! 
Karsfield, Torquay. F. B. Doveton. 
20 . Avian Mania ? — A hen chaffinch has been pecking at my windows 
for the last two or three weeks. It pecks at all the lower windows on both sides 
of the house, sometimes going on for three or four hours at a time most violently. 
It is supplied with food and water, and does not want to come in if the windows 
are open. It does not come for insects as it does not stop, only dashes its bill so 
hard against the middle of a pane of glass, that one can hear it all over the 
house. What can it want ? 
[See Note ii6 on p. 115 supra, Et). N.N.'\ 
Skere, Gtiildford, May g. A. Warren. 
21 . Retention of Foliage. — Will you kindly explain through Nature 
Notes how it is that some trees, I refer to oaks and beeches, retain their leaves all 
winter ? Of course I refer to shrivelled, lifeless leaves. This is very common 
with young trees, but this past winter I noticed a full-grown oak that retained its 
foliage up to the middle of April ; it now has buds in a very forward condition. 
T/tyl, N. Wales. F. L. Rawlins. 
May I, 1904. 
[The fall of the leaf in deciduous trees depends largely on the formation in 
late summer of a layer of cork across the cellular tissues of the leaf-base, pressing 
upon the vessels of the leaf-stalk. Thus cut off from communication with the 
root the leaf withers, and when its compressed veins are broken by the wind it 
falls. If a leaf-bearing branch be partially broken through in summer its leaves 
will wither at once, from the interruption of the food-supply from the root, but 
this interruption taking place prematurely before the development of the “ absciss- 
layer ” the cork is not formed, and the leaves, though the first to wither, remain 
attached to the bough through the winter. When a Beech or Hornbeam hedge 
is clipped, or when Oak or other trees are pollarded or coppiced, it would seem 
that the large demand made on the formation of cuticularised tissue in the form 
of “callus ” at the cut surfaces prevents the formation of the cork across the bases 
of the leaves. If young uninjured “spear" trees retain their withered leaves it 
is probably a similar economy of nutrition, owing to the larger demands upon all 
their plastic material made by their rapid growth. This would seem to be an 
instance of the law, slated by the late Sir James Paget in his Surgical Pathology, 
that in highly complex organisms every part may be looked upon as an excretion 
to every other, which is but a restatement of Geoffroy St. Hilaire’s law of 
“ balancement of growth," which, again, is as old as Aristotle’s “ S.y.a di rf/o avr^v 
vir ( poxh >' rroAAous rSirovs aSward Siavfisfiv f) <pv(rts.’’ — Ed. JV.JV.] 
/ 
22 . Petalody of Calyx. — The enclosed Primula flower is one from a 
plant on which all are the same ; there is no calyx to any of them, and it would 
interest me and others very much if you would kindly explain the process 
through which they come in Na'i ure Notes next week. 
C. J. Maurice. 
[There is no class of (piestions in biology as to which we are more profoundly 
ignorant than we are as to the causes of abnormal variations or “ sports ” such as 
“ petalody ’’ or “ calycanthemy ’’ of the calyx. Our correspondent is not techni- 
cally correct in saying that his specimen has no calyx. The calyx is present, but 
is petaloid, like the corolla. This is, in a variation, a phenomenon similar to the 
cases where floral colouring repeats it.self in bracts, or even — as in the Violet — 
in galls ; but as to the conditions of its origin nothing is known. — El). A^. A.] 
