428 The Rev. P. Keith 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 agglutinated, 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 



