Reviews. — Lindkifs Theory of Horticulture. 29 



growth will occur. According to Annates des Sciences^ 

 wheat, barley, kidney beans, and flax, retained their vitality 

 for a quarter of an hour in vapor at 143° 6', and in dry air at 

 167° they sustained no injury. 



On saving seed for transmission to foreign countries, we 

 are told in Chapter VII., 



Upon the whole, the only mode which is calcnlated to meet all the 

 circumstances to whicli seeds are exposed during a voyage is to dry 

 them as thoroughly as possit)le, enclose them in coarse paper, and to 

 pack the papers themselves very loosely in coarse canvass bags, not 

 enclosed in boxes, but freely exposed to the air; and to insure their 

 transmission in some dry well ventilated place. Thus, if the seeds 

 are originally dried incompletely, they will become further dried on 

 their passage; if the seed i)apnr is damp, as it almost always is, the 

 moisture will fly oft' through the sides of the bags, and will not stag- 

 nate around the seeds. It is true that, under such circumstances, the 

 fieeds will be exposed to the fluctuations of temperature, and to the 

 influence of the atmosphere; but neither the one nor the other of 

 these is likely to be productive of injury to the germinating principle. 

 The excellence of this method I can attest from my own observation. 

 Large quantities of seeds have been annually transmitted from India 

 for many years, doubtless gathered with care, it is to be presumed 

 prepared with every attention to the preservation of the vital princi- 

 ple, and certainly packed with all those precautions which have been 

 erroneously supposed to be advantageous; the hopelessness of rais- 

 ing plants from such seeds has at length become so apparent, that 

 many persons have altogether abandoned the attempt, and will not 

 take the trouble to sow them when they arrive. But the seeds sent 

 from India by Dr. Falconer, packed in the manner last descril)ed, 

 exposed to all the accidents which those first mentioned can have 

 encountered, have germinated so well, that we can scarcely say that 

 the failure has been greater than if they had been collected in the 

 south of Europe. 



I have no doubt that the general badness of the seeds from Brazil, 

 from the Indian Archipelago, and from other intertropical countries, 

 is almost always to be ascribed to the seeds having been originally 

 insufliciently dried, and then enclosed in tightly packed boxes, 

 whence the superfluous moisture had no means of escape. 



Theory of suckers in Chapter XI. 



Suckers are branches naturally thrown up by a plant from its base, 

 when the onward current of growth of the stem is stopped. Every 

 stem, even the oldest, nnist have been once covered with leaves; 

 each leaf had a bud in its axil; but, of those buds, few are developed 

 as branches, and the remainder remain latent or perish. When the 

 onward growth of a plant is arrested, the sap is driven to find new 

 outlets, and then latent buds are very likely to be developed; in fact, 

 when the whole plant is young, they must necessarily shoot forth 

 under fitting circumstances; the well known effect of cutting down 

 a tree is an exemplification of this. Such branches, if they proceed 



