32 WORCESTER COUNTY HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. [1872. 



Knight, President of the London Horticultural Society, an eminent 

 practical horticulturist and writer upon horticultural subjects, that a 

 variety of fruit, as, for instance, the Russett or Greening Apple, propa- 

 gated by grafting could not at the farthest outlive the tree with which 

 the variety originated, has been evoked from the obscurity into which it 

 had fallen, to explain the failure of Apples. It has been said that our 

 grafted apples were, in accordance Avith this theory, running out and dis- 

 appearing by exhaustion. But while the Apple crop of this year has 

 Uttle tendency to support this theory, and although it has been proved 

 by experiment that grafted trees will continue to live and thrive and bear 

 fruit long after the death from old age of the original tree from which 

 the grafts were taken, still it seems to me not improbable that this theory 

 of Mr. Knight may turn out like many other theories when fully sub- 

 jected to the experimentum crucis, to be at least a half-truth. A view of 

 this question — as to the permanence of varieties — based upon certain 

 physiological facts relative to the general subject of organic reproduction, 

 has occurred to me, which I will offer for what it is worth. 



There are two methods of reproduction in the animal as well as the 

 vegetable kingdoms of nature — sexual union and budding, technically 

 called gemmation from (jemma, a bud, or Jlssion from fissio, to divide. 



The two important discoveries that there is distinction of sex in plants 

 as well as animals, and that many of the lower forms of animals reproduce 

 like plants, by budding, proves the intimate relationship of the two grand 

 divisions of organic being. It is true of plants as well as animals that 

 from the union of male and female results an embi-yonic germ or ovule, 

 (rudimentary seed or egg), which developes into a new individual. It is 

 also true that certain animals of the invertebrate sub-kingdoms, as the 

 oyster, for instance, may reproduce by budding or the natural fission of 

 one individual into two or more. And nearly all plants, perhaps all, can 

 l)e reproduced in both method:^, that is, either from the seed or fi'om buds. 

 We are accustomed to regard the apple tree as of the singular number, 

 an individual, and such is not only the popular opinion, but there is for it 

 the authority, not only of all our grammarians, logicians and dictionary 

 makers, but even of the botanists, who, though they know better, yet for 

 the sake of convenience in classification treat a tree as an individual 

 just as the astronomers adopt the popular phrases in regard to the sun's 

 rising and setting. Logically speaking, however, an individual is that 

 which cannot be divided without ceasing to be, and the term is applied 

 to organic beings animal or vegetable as distinguished from inorganic 

 matter which is divisible ad libitum. But a tree can be divided. Every 

 bud upon it is an individual, can be separated from the parent stock and 

 is capable of becoming itself another tree. And a tree with many buds 

 upon it is as much a colony or community as a bee-hive or a coral-reef. 



