Among the insects that feed upon the Elm's foliage, the most noteworthy is the caterpillar of the fine Large Tortoiseshell Butterfly (_Vanessa polychloros_). I have already mentioned the relationship subsisting between Elms and Nettles, and it is a point worth noting that nearly all our native species of _Vanessa_ feed in the larval state upon the leaves of the Nettle. In London parks and squares the Elms are much infested by the caterpillars of the Vapourer-moth, whose wingless females may be seen like short-legged spiders on the bark, whilst the male flutters in an apparently aimless way on wings of rich brown with central white spots. [Illustration: _Pl. 38._ Common Elm--winter.] In October the leaves, which have for some time assumed a very dull dark-green tint, suddenly turn to orange, then fade to pale yellow, and fall in showers. The name Elm was derived from the Latin _Ulmus_, and appears to indicate an instrument of punishment--probably from its rods having been used to belabour slaves. Prior remarks that the word is "nearly identical in all the Germanic and Scandinavian dialects, but does not find its root in any of them. It plays through all the vowels ... but stands isolated as a foreign word which they have adopted." This "playing through the vowels" may be thus illustrated--Alm, Aelm, and Elm (Anglo-Saxon and English); Ilme, Olm, and Ulme, in various German dialects. * * * * * [Illustration: _Pl. 39._ Ash--summer.] The Ash (_Fraxinus excelsior_). So commanding, yet at the same time so light and graceful, does a well-grown Ash appear, that Gilpin called it the "Venus of the Woods." This may appear to some to be rather too close an approach to the "Lady of the Woods" (Birch), but in our opinion it well expresses the characteristics of the two. They are both exceedingly graceful, but the beauty of the Birch is that of the nymph, whilst that of the Ash is the combined grace and strength of the goddess. I have said "a well-grown" Ash, a phrase by which the timberman would understand a tree that had been hemmed in so closely by other trees that it has had no chance of developing as a tree, but only as a straight stout stick of wood, from eighty to one hundred feet long. _My_ well-grown Ash is in a meadow, where both soil and atmosphere are moist and cool; where it has had elbow-room to reach its long graceful arms upwards and outwards, and to cover them with the plumy circlets of long leaves. It is there, or on the outskirts of the wood, or in the hedgerow, that the Ash is able to do credit to Gilpin's name for it. [Illustration: Ash.]