The Rev. P. Keith on the Origin of Buds. 427 



might have been decided by experiments made by the above or 

 by other phytologists many years ago, if the experimenters had 

 but instituted them with that particular view. Dr. Hope's ex- 

 periment, for example, might have decided it. If any bud is- 

 sued from the wood that was formed within the displaced and 

 hollow bark of the Willow on which his experiment was made ; 

 then buds are, to say the least, occasionally generated and pro- 

 truded into shoots without having been formed originally at the 

 centre, and without having come horizontally to the circum- 

 ference. So also in the experiments of Du Hamel and of 

 Knight, — if any shoot issued from the new layers that were su- 

 perinduced by vegetation over a decorticated portion of albur- 

 num that had been left exposed to the action of the atmosphere, 

 so long as to destroy its vitality, then were buds generated and 

 brought to the circumference through a route different from that 

 of the horizontal channel. Yet as no fact of this sort has hitherto 

 been observed or recorded, as far as my reading or recollection 

 goes, and as vvounds by decortication or by excision are con- 

 tinually happening and again healing up, I began to think of 

 looking out for examples, which, if they existed, it could not be 

 very difficult to find. 



On the 20th of September last I observed a shoot actually 

 issuing from the lip formed over the section of a lopped branch 

 of a Lime-tree. The tree grew in the garden of the Vicar of 

 Ashford in Kent. In what did the bud originate ? In the lip, 

 or in the truncated branch ? On the 25th I caused a portion of 

 the trunk to be sawed off, so as to expose the origin of the bud 

 as much as possible. The inspection of it was not decisive, as 

 the lip was the growth of one year only, and the bud seemed 

 rather to have come from the interior of the wood. 



On the 30th of the same month, I observed in my walks an 

 Elm-tree of about eight or nine inches in diameter, and twenty 



feet 



