STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 65 



and "asexual," meaning with and without sex respectively. Then fol- 

 lows the generalization, that all ]ilants originate by the union of two 

 elements of a different but compatible nature, or by the development of 

 one single element. So far as we now know, the seed of a phenogomous 

 (or flowering) plant alone fully represents the first or sexual class, while 

 every bud represents the second or asexual class, as do also the spores of 

 that immense division, the cryptogamia or flowerless plants, which, 

 though they sometimes seem to show a low order of sexuality, are virtu- 

 ally, in our present state of knowledge, asexual. 



A seed, as we see it, is but a young plant in a dormant condition, 

 possessing within itself, or around it, stores of plant food, sufficient to 

 start it well on in its young life. In the squash seed there is nothing 

 inside the seed-coats but a plant with very large leaves and a very small 

 stem and root, but for all that, a plant, and a plant only. 



In the seed of corn there is a plant on the one side, and the balance 

 and larger i)art of the mass of what we call seed is the stored food for the 

 plant's use in its infantile or dependent state. In the pine nut there is, 

 as you may see, a miniature pine tree, packed nicely away in the central 

 axis of the store of food which is laid away for its use wlien it shall under- 

 take life on its account. But in each of these cases the seed is plainly not 

 the beginning of the new life, but only a halting-place on its way, adap- 

 ted to tide it over the non-vegetative season of the year, or to continue its 

 life without growth for a longer or shorter period. The beginning is 

 really the confluence of two simple cells — the pollen cell and the germinal 

 sack of the ovule. At infloresence, these two elements — which are called 

 sexual, and which may either belong to the same flower, to separate 

 flowers upon the same plant, or to separate flowers upon separate plants — 

 are brought together by the wonderfully beautiful arrangements of the 

 anthers, stigmas, and ovaries; and just here at this }:)oint of contact 

 occurs the beginning of this composite, individual life — a unity and yet a 

 compound. Only the higher orders of vegetable life, and the higher 

 orders of animal life, have reached that perfection in the organic scale 

 which is a prerequisite to sexual reproduction ; and, as we descend to 

 lower and lower organisms among both plants and animals, this composite 

 reproduction gives way to the other or single reproduction, in which sex 

 is obliterated, and the new life starts into being from the simple, infecun- 

 date cell. Growth, jihysiologically considered, consists of the aggrega- 

 tion of material and the multiplication of cells ; and the asexual rej^ro- 

 duction is then simply a form or growth in which a cell springs into being 

 — as all cells do from some other cell — and then takes up a separate life 

 and a complete individuality. 



"Right here, where the simplest form of plant life, the single cell, 

 stands upon the boundary between dead matter and vitalized matter, the 

 two great organic forms, the animal and the plant, seem to meet. The 

 simplest plant, the single cell, increasing and reproducing by gemmation 

 or budding, and the simplest animal, a single cell also, increasing and 

 reproducing by gemmation, are too nearly identical in nature to have 

 been fully and clearly separated by human science thus far." 



