lxxxii PROCEEDINGS OF THE 
‘or individual varieties, against the ever-present causes of destruction, 
and at the same time checks that over-multiplication which might 
result from those very provisions. Those sudden appearances of 
myriads of insects known in rural districts under the name of blight, 
their enormous means of multiplication, and their almost total disap- 
pearance the following season are as yet a mystery to us, both as 
to their cause and their influences. The perusal of Mr. Darwin’s 
first chapters will show that there is much still to ascertain in the 
action of insects even on our common Orchids; and how little do we 
know of the real history of the life of those sets of plants upon 
whose external forms volumes have been published! How is it that 
when our hedges are annually loaded with the fruit of the bramble, 
or our fields covered with the down of Carduus arvensis, we seldom 
see a seedling of the one or the other ?—nature having concurrently 
provided for their propagation by the inarching and rooting stems of 
the former and the creeping rhizomes of the latter. How is it that 
in many localities every individual Epilobium montanum, before it 
dies down in the autumn, has surrounded itself not only by numerous 
offshoots, each one armed against the rigours of winter so as to 
form an independent new plant in the spring, but also by a wide- 
spreading progeny already born from the hundreds or even thousands 
of seeds it has shed; and yet when we examine the same spot the 
following year, the number of Zpilobiwms has not increased, and you 
may look long before you find among them a single seedling, every 
individual you uproot proving to be the result of a previous year’s off- 
shoot? In this excessive multiplication of autumn seedlings have we 
perchance a provision in aid of insect or other animal life—some- 
thing analogous to that concurrence of natural causes, which at one 
of your last year’s meetings was described as insect horticulture? 
We usually close our observation of living plants in October, and 
recommence it in March, when in many respects a total change has 
taken place: the gradual progress of that change remains to be 
watched. I am well aware that numerous papers on the life and 
development of plants have been published, more especially in 
French and German periodicals, and must be consulted by observers 
before they can safely draw any conclusion; but many of these 
treat the subject solely with a view to specific distinction, and 
scarcely ever in relation to habits induced by external influences of 
station and climate, still less with reference to that connexion with 
insect life revealed by Mr. Darwin. We have had enough of splitting 
of hairs and counting of spots, and of idle controversies as to whether 
