How Plants Perpetuate Their Kinds 279 



among plants, but among the simpler animals as well. We may 

 best consider this asexual type before proceeding to the more 

 familiar sexual kind. 



Asexual reproduction is effected through the separation of a 

 portion of plant structure capable of growing into a new plant 

 without any preliminary fertilization or other influence of sex. 

 In the higher and more familiar plants 

 it is rather rare. Almost anybody can 

 recall the dark, ovoid bodies which are 

 borne by Lilies in the axils of their leaves 

 (figure 92), and which easily separate 

 and produce new plants. These, though 

 seemingly seeds, are really a kind of 

 bulblet specialized for this sort of veae- 



FIG. 92. A portion of stem, with 



tative multiplication; and equivalent leaves, of a Lily, showing the 



i j- fit ? .1 axillary bulblets mentioned in 



bodies are found also on a few other the text. (Copied from Gray's 

 kinds of plants. Again, the runners, structural Botany.) 

 suckers, stolons, and other similar structures sent over or under 

 the ground by Strawberries, Blackberries, Grasses, and many 

 wide-ranging weeds, produce vegetative shoots at their tips, and 

 thus propagate vegetatively while securing a kind of dissemina- 

 tion, as we shall note more fully in our chapter on the last- 

 mentioned subject. It is, however, a fact of great interest, and 

 likewise of much practical consequence, that although most of the 

 higher plants have lost their power of propagating themselves 

 vegetatively, they can yet be made artificially to reproduce in that 

 way. Thus, the propagation of plants by slips or cuttings of any 

 sort is artificial vegetative reproduction. Great numbers of plants 

 will strike root of themselves and grow when slips thereof are 

 placed in the earth; others which will make no roots in this way 

 can be made to do so by various devices of gardeners; while still 

 others which cannot be made to strike roots at all can yet be 

 fitted with a set, so to speak, by the operation of grafting, as the 

 reader will learn more fully in our later chapter on Growth. 



