PROPAGATION. 230 



sufficient force to overcome the inertia of the mass constituting the wedge. 

 With a heavy wedge and a light hammer no effect will be produced ; 

 because the impulse of the latter has not sufficient power to overcome the 

 inertia of the former. 



SECT. II. Operations of Culture. 



Operations of garden culture may be arranged under the heads of propa- 

 gation, rearing, preservation, and amelioration. 



SUBSECT. I. Propagation. 



551. Plants are propagated either by seed, or by division : the latter mode 

 including cuttings, joints, leaves, layers, suckers, slips, budding, grafting, and 

 inarching. All the modes of propagation by division are founded on the 

 principle that a bud, whether visible or latent, is essentially the same 

 as a seed, and will consequently produce a plant; and that, as there is 

 a bud, either visible or in an embryo state, in the axil of every leaf, 

 it follows that for every leaf a plant contains, a young plant may be 

 originated by art. This, however, is not done with equal ease in every 

 species, and perhaps with some it may be almost impracticable; but it 

 holds good with the great majority of plants, and may therefore safely 

 be laid down and acted on as a general principle (12, 114 to 116). 

 There is an important difference between propagating by seed, and 

 propagating by any of the other modes known to gardeners : viz., that 

 in propagating by seed, the species in the abstract is propagated, while in 

 propagating by any of the other modes, the species is continued with the 

 habits of the individual parent. Thus, a shoot taken from a weeping ash, 

 and grafted on a common ash, will produce a tree like the parent ; while 

 a seed taken from a weeping ash will not in general produce a weeping plant, 

 but an upright growing one like the species. Nevertheless this does not 

 always hold good, even in such trees as the weeping ash, and the weeping 

 oak ; and it does not hold good at all in the case of trees in a high state 

 of culture, such as fruit trees ; or in the case of herbaceous plants in a 

 highly artificial state, such as the culinary vegetables of our gardens, and 

 the principal agricultural plants of our farms. The weeping ash was an 

 accidental sport (16); but notwithstanding this, out of many hundred 

 plants raised from seed collected from a weeping tree by a nurseryman at 

 Berlin, one or two were found to exhibit the weeping characters of the 

 parent ; and when we consider that all the common weeping ash trees in 

 Europe have been propagated from one tree, that at Gamblingay, in Cam- 

 bridgeshire, and that this tree is a female, so that the blossoms, when fertile 

 seeds have been produced must have been fecundated by the male blossoms 

 of some adjoining common ash, the small proportion of weeping plants 

 raised is not surprising. The acorns produced by a celebrated weeping oak 

 at Moccas Court, in Herefordshire, produce plants almost all of which 

 have the branches drooping, though this tree is not farther removed from 

 nature than the weeping ash, both having been found accidentally in a wild 

 state. The stones of a green-gage plum, and the seeds of a golden pippin 

 apple, will unquestionably produce plants, many of which will bear varieties 

 of the green- gage and golden pippin ; and though these may vary from the 

 fruit of their parents, yet they will not vary more than the produce of a wild- 

 ing, such as a crab apple, or a wild plum, will sometimes do from its parent. 



B 2 



