248 
NATURE NOTES 
201. Autumn Tints. — In speaking of this familiar subject I wish to do 
so rather interrogatively than positively : to hazard conjectures rather than to lay 
down the law. We have had some very beautiful displays this autumn, and 
should have had more but for the ruthless trimming back of tbe hedges when at 
their very gayest. It seems to me certain that the sun has much to do with 
bringing out the bright colours which are so much more conspicuous in some 
years than in others ; and I would offer tentatively a suggestion, that sunny 
weather (say, from July to September) is favourable to a gay autumn. Coming 
to particular leaves, to those of the hazel, for instance — and I think there are 
none that better repay individual study — one may see a leaf with a beautiful 
curve in it, so that one part catches the full power of the sun, while other parts 
are almost shaded from it. In such a case the gradations of colour are often 
wonderful and gloriaus : the sunniest part may be a rich scarlet, passing through 
orange to yellow, and almost pure green, with most lovely shading in the 
“ridge and furrow” of the leaf. I have brought in to-day (November 4), what 
I call a beautiful bouquet of maple, bazel, and oak. But what strikes me now 
in the hazel leaves is not so much the gradations of colour as the appearance of 
green sprinkled with gold dust : I don’t think any other phrase would describe 
the effect. The maple leaves show great variety, some are almost as pure gold 
as we may see on the elm ; some show a kind of harlequin mixture of reddish- 
orange and green, and so on. I have seen beautiful “ ridge and furrow ” effects 
in hornbeam leaves in this and other years ; but I have noted one hornbeam 
which gets very little sun (as I think) in the day, and I observed that its leaves 
turned a uniform yellow without any variety that I could see. This seemed to 
me to favour the idea that the finest and most varied effects are (at least in 
many cases), dependent on sunshine. As part of a distant view no leaves have 
a richer effect than those of the wild cherry, which may, I suppose, be called 
crimson or blood-red. The hedge-trimming has deprived me, to a great extent, 
of one favourite combination ; viz., the golden maple against the brown-purple 
dog-wood. The extensive planting of poplar in and round our hop-gardens has 
added a distinctly new feature ; the leaves turn to a pale slightly greenish-yellow, 
different, I think, from any other common tree : one may contrast it with the much 
deeper gold of the tulip-tree. 
And here I stop, not attempting to describe the stag’s horn sumach, or many 
others that will occur to your readers. But there is a certain pardonable pleasure 
in recalling the feast that we have been enjoying, at the time when its dainties 
are in the act of being removed. 
Otham, Maidstone. F. M. Mili.ard. 
202. Catesby and the Gatalpa. — Mark Catesby was born, not in 
London, as the “ Dictionary of National Biography” surmises, but at Sudbury 
in Suffolk, about the year 1679. Having relatives in Virginia he went out there 
in 1712 and stayed seven years, sending home dried specimens of plants “ and 
some of the most specious of them in tubs of earth at the request of some curious 
friends, amongst whom was Mr. Dale, of Braintree.” Some observations of his 
on the country having been communicated by Dale to William Sherard, when 
Catesby returned to England in 1719 he was commissioned by Sherard, Sloane, 
Mead, Harley and others to go out to Carolina. This he did in 1722, travelling 
into the interior and visiting Georgia, Florida and the Bahamas before his return 
in 1726. He then settled at Hoxton, where he had some of his plants grown at 
the City (Jardens in which Thomas Fairchild had just been succeeded by Bacon 
— a nurseryman, not Sir Francis. Though not t>red an artist, owing to the 
expense of publishing his work he learnt the art of etching, and in 1730 began 
the publication of his great work, “The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, 
and the Bahama Islands” in numbers, each containing twenty plates. The first 
volume, containing too plates, was completed in 1732, and the appears 
in this as Plate 49. The second volume, containing too mote plates with their 
accompanying pages of letterpress in English and French, and the general 
account of the country, was completed in 1743, and an Appendix of twenty more 
plates and pages of description appeared in 1748. The work is in imperial folio, 
and, as animals and plants are represented together the 220 plates comprise 401 
subjects, which are mostly of natural size. As Catesby etched all the plates 
