428 The Rev. P. Kerru on the Origin of Buds. 
feet in height, the stem of which had been wounded some years 
ago, by a portion of its bark having been stripped off to the ex- 
tent of about ten inches in length by five or six in breadth, and 
at about a foot and a half from the ground. On the edges of this 
wound was formed a lip of new bark and wood, narrowing its 
extent, and forming a margin of between two and three inches 
in breadth. The surface of the lip was marked with ridges and 
furrows indicating a growth of at least three years ; and from the 
last and innermost ridge there had issued two shoots of several 
inches in length in the course of the preceding summer. Now 
it was to be inferred, that these shoots could not have originated 
in, nor proceeded from, the pith or central layers of wood, 
because the vitality of the outer layer had been destroyed by 
means of its exposure to the atmosphere, in consequence of the 
decortication of part of the trunk ; so that it could no longer 
afford a passage for a centrifugal bud. Nor could these shoots 
have made their way to the place of their protrusion, from any - 
given point in the sound part of the layer that was partially 
decorticated ; because in that case the buds would have had to 
travel across the divergent layers, which there is no proof of their 
being able to do, or example of their having ever done. 
On the 13th of October I caused a horizontal section, pene- 
trating to a sufficient depth, to be made both above and below 
the shoots, and the portion between the sections to be extracted. 
The inspection of the extracted portion corroborated my infe- 
rences in every particular. The buds had no radiant nor radical - 
connexion with the centre of the stem, as was evident from the 
intervening layer of dead wood, to which the bark and wood of 
the lip were indeed vegetably agelutinated, but not connected by 
a continuity of living growth. Beyond that layer the medullary 
rays began anew, and took a totally different direction. Hence 
it follows irresistibly,that the shoots in question originated merely 
in 
