THE LONGEVITY OF SUBMERGED SEEDS 



GEORGE HARRISON SHULL 

 Station for Experimental Evolution, Cold Spring Harbor, N. Y. 



The durability of protoplasm, when packed away in condensed 

 form in seeds, has interested several generations of botanists, 

 and a nmnber of statements are now on record, having various 

 degrees of probabihty, indicating that under certain conditions 

 certain seeds may have retained their vitality even for centuries. 

 I need not enter into an enumeration or discussion of these cases, 

 but refer the reader to papers by de Candolle^ and Kunz^,^ in 

 which a considerable number of these instances are brought to- 

 gether. It is generally recognized that conditions favorable to 

 great longevity are dryness, moderate and uniform temperature, 

 and the partial or complete exclusion of oxygen. 



Some fully authenticated cases and one definite experiment^ 

 show that seeds of certain species can grow after at least a quarter 



1 De CandoUe, C., The latent vitality of seeds. Pop. Sci. Monthly 51: 106-111. 



- Kunze, R. E., Germination and vitality of seeds. Read before the Torrey 

 Botanical Club, December 13, 1881. Published by subscription of members of 

 the Club. No date. 



^ This very interesting and instructive experiment of Prof. W. J. Beal was be- 

 gun at the Michigan Agricultural College in the autumn of 1879, and the results 

 have been reported from time to time in the Proceedings of the Society for the 

 Promotion of Agricultural Science. The following brief statement taken from the 

 Report of the 31st Annual Meeting of that Society, may sufficiently explain the 

 details of the experiment : 



"I selected fifty freshly grown seeds of each of twenty-three different kinds of 

 plants. Twenty such lots were prepared with the view of testing them at different 

 times in the future. Each lot or set of seed was well mixed in moderately moist 

 sand, just as it was taken from three feet below the surface, where the land had 

 never been plowed. The seeds of each lot were well mixed with the sand and 

 placed in a pint bottle, the bottles being filled and left uncorked and placed with 

 the mouth slanting downward so that water could not accumulate about the seeds. 

 These bottles were buried on a sandy knoll in a row running east and west, and 

 placed fifteen paces northwest from the west end of the big stone set up by the 

 class of 1873. A boulder stone barely even with the surface soil was set at each 



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