194 
NATURE NOTES 
427. Alien Plants. — About two months ago, while walking on the sand- 
hills at Birkdale, I noticed a plant growing there which I had not seen before. 
The plant resembled a forget-me-not, but the flower was of a bright orange- 
colour. The plant was pressed and sent to the Natural History Department at 
the British Museum, where it was discovered to be a native of the south of North 
America and the north of South America. They say the seed has probably come 
to England in ballast. The name of the plant is Amsinckia lycopsoides, and it 
was growing among large plants of Ragwort, Viper’s Bugloss, and Henbane. 
Near the same place I noticed a huge thistle with very beautiful flowers, which, 
I am told, is also a foreigner. 
17, Crescent Road, Birkdale, Lancashire, Florence Hooton. 
August 5, 1906. 
[The Amsinckia, a native of California, is stated in Mr. Dunn’s “ Alien 
Flora,” to be “ a grain introduction and . . a wool-waste plant.” — E d. , W.Afl] 
428. The Eared Elm of Hampstead. — Owing to its dangerous condi- 
tion, the famous old elm tree on the Spaniard’s Road side of IFeath House, the 
residence of Lord Iveagh, was removed on September 10. Sir Samuel Wilks, 
Bart., writes to the Hampstead Express : “ This well-known tree has been 
decaying for some time past, and for the last three years it has been absolutely 
dead. On last Monday morning it was pulled down by a rope, as it was on the 
brink of falling, having crumbled into dust at its roots, and with an interior so 
soft that it could be scooped out with the hand. Whether this rottenness was 
due simply to decay from age, or whether it was mainly due to a fungus growth, 
was not very evident from a superficial examination. The great feature of the 
tree was the large protuberance or excrescence, which somewhat resembled the 
human ear, and which appeared to be three or four feet in diameter. This pro- 
tuberance consisted of a mass of bark formed in concentric layers, which lay over 
one another, each of which was about one-third of an inch thick. Being attached 
to the tree somewhat like the human ear to the face, this auricle of bark was com- 
posed of about a hundred semicircles. It looked at first glance as if these rings 
corresponded with what might have been seen in a transverse sectional view of 
the stem, or, in other words, as if the substance of the tree with its rings had been 
thrust outwards. This, of course, was found not to be the case, although pro- 
bably the layers of bark were formed synchronously with those in the wood. 
Two years ago I requested my granddaughter to take a photo of it, and in this it 
will easily be seen that the protuberance is divided into about a hundred semi- 
circles. This picture I showed to Prof. Boulger, of the Royal Agricultural 
College, who, I believe, had previously seen the tree, and he offered his opinion 
that the excrescence was the site of a lost limb which happened many years ago. 
The bark had grown over it year by year to heal the wound, so that instead of, 
as is usually the case, the annual growth of bark formed by the cambium uniting 
with the older growths to form a thick and irregular covering of bark to the tree, 
there arose every year a new layer, followed by another, which stretched over it, 
until a hundred of these at least had been formed. The old original wound had 
been thus covered and the present size of the excrescence reached. Prof. 
Boulger thinks that then or subsequently the tree became pervaded by a fungus 
or other parasitic growth ; that this caused its death some years ago, and at last 
changed all the tissues into a pulpy mass, so that it could stand upright no longer. 
Looking at this stuff through a lens, some remains of a fibrous tissue may 
apparently be seen, and amongst them rows of transparent globules, but whether 
these are sporules or not I cannot decide. I could see no living mycelium, but a 
number of threads which were probably the remains of them.” 
To this, Mr. James Whiting, the well-known secretary of our Hampstead 
Branch, adds : “ Its decay I am disposed to assign partly to the smoke of 
London, which these trees cannot endure, but more especially to the gas leakage, 
however small it may be, which permeates through the ground from the pipes 
running alongside the road. About the time I noticed its health beginning to be 
impaired, when its leaves grew smaller with each succeeding year, the larvae of 
the goat-moth — Cossus ligniperda — took possession of this once stately tree. 
Every summer for the last ten or twelve years numbers of the destructive cater- 
pillars of those insects have been observed escaping from the trunk, hurrying 
