1856.] Vegetable Reproduction, etc. 263 



edition, he says — " The individual cell is endowed with the power of 

 forming neio cells in its interior, and thus, as it were, of propagating 

 itself. Now the newly formed cells have also this peculiarity ; they 

 grow and arrange themselves conformably to the cell in which they 

 originate. Thus the power is given to all plants to develop new plants 

 out of any of their cells, when these come to be placed m favorable 

 circumstances, and hy this power is explained the faciUty with which 

 almost all jjlants may be multiplied.'' 



Properly speaking, the simple plant consists merely of a simple stem 

 and its leaves ; but in the angles of the leaves and stem particular cells 

 are regularly developed into buds. Now a bud is nothing more nor 

 less than a repetition of the simple plant on which it is formed ; and 

 this foundation for a new plant consists, like the other, of a stem and 

 leaves ; and the sole substantial distinction is, that the new stom be- 

 comes intimately blended at its base with the substance of the mother 

 plant, of whose vitality it partakes, and by whose nourishment it grows, 

 but having no free and independent radical extremity, like that developed 

 by a plant whose growth has sprung from the seed. Every bud or 

 branch when separated from the mother plant and brought into growth, 

 (as under favorable circumstances they sometimes are) is, therefore, a 

 new and independent plant, though the power of making adveutive 

 roots is continually modified in the various plants. 



In like manner such propagating cells are found in the leaves and 

 roots of many plants ; and these, under appropriate circumstances, pro- 

 duce buds, and therefrom new plants. In this simple and beautiful 

 procedure in the economy of vegetation, we find the full explanation 

 and philosophy of all the various operations of gardening by which 

 plants are propagated by the various methods of grafting and budding, 

 as well as by cuttings and by single leaves. All these modes of reproduc- 

 tion, as compared with the natural reproduction from seed, Schh^iden 

 denominates " irregular propagation." Of this, at page eighty of the 

 work just quoted, he says, — " Every plant produces within itself a 

 definite number of single, free, unconnected cells, which, at a certain 

 epoch, spontaneously separate from the plant. It is the peculiar char- 

 acter of those plants which have true leaves, to produce these cells only 

 in the interior of the leaves, which, at the same time, often assume a 

 very different form, as, for instance, in the stamens. Only in the very 

 lowest plants, flowering wholly under water, is the propagative cell 

 naked ; in all others, it is invested with a peculiar substance, which 

 has not yet been chemically examined, but is mostly yellow and inde- 

 structible." =-'^ * =•' "The following are the two modes of development: 



