CHAPTER V. 



LIFE LIVES IN CELLS CONTINUING LIFE BY CUTTINGS THE 

 CONDITIONS REQUIRED DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A 

 CUTTING AND A SEEDLING-KIND OF CUTTINGS- 

 TIME TO STRIKE THEM. 



A CELL is the unit of life. In a seed it lives in a single cell, 

 with power to live and add to itself new cells. A poly- 

 pus cut into a hundred parts, each piece will grow a per- 

 fect polypus. An expert English propagator recently died in 

 Chicago whose keen preception of required conditions, it is said, 

 enabled him to root cuttings from any hard wood plant or tree 

 that grows. In a cutting, life exists in many cells already formed 

 with prove to multiply themselves. A slip severed from a par- 

 ent plant faces death which only human sagacity prevents; experi- 

 ence has demonstrated that if it is placed in pure sand with proper 

 moisture, heat, light and air, it will develop roots and perpetuate 

 itself. 



The law of life, as announced by the venerable Thomas Mee- 

 han, has been vindicated by twenty years of observation, viz: 

 "Nature in the vegetable kingdom always makes an effort to con- 

 tinue life in the ratio of its danger ot death." Extinction, or per- 

 sistence, confronts cell life in a cutting, and it struggles for con- 

 tinuance. The features, habits and all the qualities of a seedling 

 carnation are fixed the moment ancestral life-forces meet, mix and 

 mingle in a primal cell, in the ovarian crypt. That method of 

 treating carnation cuttings and plants is the best which is closest 

 along the line of character nature has impressed on the species. 



Henzie's carnation, the Napoleon of American whites, origi- 

 nated in Detroit. It was the seedling of a plant that had remained 

 out unprotected the previous winter, and the parent of millions of 

 cuttings before it met its Waterloo against the resistless legions of 

 better kinds. 



