PINUS PINASTER. 
5 
branches close and twiggy. Retarded as it necessarily is by the conditions of its growth, it does not 
increase in height part passu with its neighbours; but there is nothing dwarfish or diseased in its 
appearance, nor does it exhibit any peculiarities of constitution to which other Firs are not subject. 
“Occasionally, says Sir Charles, “as do the Pinaster and Scotch Firs, it kills itself by an exuberant 
bearing of cones ” (or, if we may alter the phrase, it produces an exuberant crop of cones when about 
to die), “ and it then assumes a very extraordinary aspeCt, reminding me of the groups of little wooden 
buds perched on the ends of sticks, at which the people of Holland and Belgium shoot for prizes with 
bows and arrows. The foliage is gone, and the tree is reduced to a collection of dry sticks, each ter¬ 
minated by a cone.” The illustration drawn from the pastimes of Holland and Belgium may not now be 
so applicable or familiar as it was thirty years ago, but the description does not need it. 
The largest tree which he had seen was a specimen which he believed to be thirty-five years of age, 
and it was 44 inches in girth, at 4 feet from the ground; but many of smaller growth assumed all the char¬ 
acters of the variety at eight or nine years of age; and even young plants only three years old, grown from 
the seeds of older specimens, already shewed symptoms of the same peculiarities. 
It may be as well first to notice the conclusions arrived at by Sir Charles Femon as to the nature of 
these peculiarities, and then to see how far they, as well as the foregoing faCts, agree with subsequent obser¬ 
vation of the variety and its growth. He considers that the distinctive characters may indicate either a 
distindt species, a hybrid, or an accidental, and perhaps permanent, variety. 
Against its being the first he has the opinion of the before-mentioned eminent botanists, and the fadt 
that no such species has been observed in any other part of the world. Against the second (its being a 
hybrid of the Pinaster with some other Fir) there is the objection that amongst many specimens gradations 
must necessarily occur, and in various instances the hybrid would approach more or less near to one or 
other of its parents. But in the trees which he found growing in his plantation there is no such mixture. 
They were altogether Pinaster, or altogether of this variety: and amongst many scores of specimens which 
he had examined he never found one which partook of both forms of growth ; in no one instance did he 
ever see a cone in the place of a leading shoot in one part of a tree, and in its ordinary situation in another. 
We agree with Sir Charles Femon in regarding this to be conclusive against the notion of the tree being 
a hybrid, but we cannot follow him when he holds that the argument is almost as applicable to the only 
remaining solution, namely, that the tree may be a variety induced by peculiarities of climate and soil, and 
exhibiting the ordinary effeCts of such change. 
“ Here also,” he says, “ it is difficult to conceive that in some part of some trees where the conversion might be incomplete, indications of 
an effort to adhere to the original type should never appear; but these indications are, as far as my observation goes, totally wanting, and the 
conversion, if such it be, is either complete or not commenced. There are also other difficulties in the way of this last supposition. Changes 
of organs, I apprehend, take place only by multiplication of parts, by abortion, or by conversion of the rudiments of the infant shoot according 
to a fixed rule of progressive development—whether from the centre to the circumference, or vice versa , I will not now inquire, for in neither 
direction can we find any explanation of a counterchange of parts by which the cones and shoots should be reciprocally converted. Where 
multiplication takes place, the side-shoots become very numerous, and this is so common as almost to form a character of the tree. Where 
abortion takes place, the side-shoots are diminished in number, and sometimes totally wanting, and the cone is left singly terminating the branch. 
In the former case, the cone itself is sometimes absent; still no regular leader supplies its place, but a broad disc marks the situation on which 
the cone should have stood ” [that is, rather the situation from which the cone has dropped]. 
The whole particulars above given are characteristic of weakness. The occasionally numerous side- 
shoots are not less so than the occasional absence of side-shoots. Two or three powerful shoots are evi¬ 
dence of strength; a multitude of small ones (and where they are numerous they must be small and weak, 
for there is no room for strong ones) is evidence of weakness. They evince the desire to make wood, but 
not the power. Regarding the plant as suffering from weakness, we shall have no difficulty in explaining 
all the faCts without having recourse to Sir Charles’s idea that the terminal cone is a converted shoot. 
The simple history of the cone is this: fig. 12 (supra) shews the natural and normal starting-points of the 
leading shoot and cones. Both the typical Pinaster and the variety Lemoniana start in this way, but in 
the latter there is not a sufficiency of sap to nourish both the bud and the cones too. There is only 
[ 26 ] c enough, 
