202 



A brief conversation ensued, in which the President, Mr. Edmunds, the Hon. 

 Secretary, and other gentlemen took part, but it did not appear that any one of 

 them had yet found the plant in flower. 



The President then called upon Mr. Edmunds to address the meeting on the 

 subject of buried seeds, some fresh facts in reference to which he understood that 

 gentleman had to state. 



Mr. Edmunds briefly recapitulated the leading points of the discussion which 

 had been originated by his friend, Mr. Lees, the well-known naturalist of Worcester, 

 at the meeting at Tarrington. They would remember that Mr. Lees took up a 

 paper which he (the speaker) had read to a former meeting of the Club, the subject 

 of which was the sudden appearance of certain species of plants fresh to the 

 district on the railway embankments near Hereford, and their almost equally 

 sudden disappearance. He had attributed their appearance to buried seeds 

 having been, by the disturbance of the soil from a considerable depth, brought 

 again within the range of atmospheric influences, which had caused their vitality 

 to revive. To this view his friend Lees had demurred, holding that the seeds 

 must have been transported by the wind, and he instanced cases of certain plants 

 always making their appearance on spots which, after having been cultivated, 

 were suffered to become waste. He (Mr. Edmunds) held that argument to be 

 unsound, for the reasons that the plants were confined to a small surface, that 

 thev did not appear before the spoil bank was made, and that they have now 

 a^am disappeared, all which facts are inconsistent with the agency of the wind in 

 the case, more especially since the plants alluded to were of the heavy-seeded 

 orders, with one exception. This exception belongs to the order Compositae, the 

 seeds in which are furnished with a pappus, or parachute-shaped crown of fibres, 

 evidently designed to aid their dispersion by the wind. 



He wished now only to add that, since the discussion, a gentleman who was 

 then present had called upon him and told him of a fact strikingly corroborative 

 of his views. A piece of old pasture land in Warwickshire had been broken up, 

 a house built and a garden laid out oupn it. To the great surprise of the occupants, 

 plants of the Rubus idaeus, or common raspberry, sprang up plentifully around 

 the house, and they have since supplied the family with all of that description of 

 fruit which they had required. Upon the theory that there had once been a wood 

 there ; that the seeds had been buried under the vegetable soil formed by decayed 

 leaves, &c. ; that, on the cutting down of the wood, the growth of the sward had 

 sealed up the seeds ; but that they germinated as soon as the removal of the turf 

 and the disturbance of the soil brought them again within reach of atmospheric 

 influence, the case was clear enough ; but he thought it quite inexplicable on 

 what he would call the ventose theory. 



He remembered having read of another case in which a gentleman, while 

 passing a long un-worked coal-pit, and observmg the buckets full of earth, &c., 

 drawn up, had filled his botanical box with it, taken it home, covered it with a 

 glass, and watered it with condensed steam, thus guarding against any arrival 

 of seeds by either wind or water. The result was that the experimenter got some 



