OFFSETS. 5 



to the eye, even with a good lens and are so extremely light, 

 that the slightest breath of air serves to waft them from the 

 parent plant, and they thus travel immense distances unseen ; 

 or they, like seeds, are carried in the plumage of birds or the 

 coats of animals. There are myriads of these subtle repro- 

 ductive bodies continually floating about in the atmosphere, 

 ready to germinate whenever they fall in suitable situations. 



OFFSETS. 



Many plants reproduce themselves very readily by offsets, 

 which may be considered as nature's method of doing what 

 propagators speak of as division. Offsets are often produced 

 in the form of little bulbs, bulbils, or tubers, as in the Potato- 

 onion, Hyacinths, and many other bulbs, many terrestrial 

 Orchids, and in the common Potato. Lilium bidbiferum bears 

 little bulbils in the axils of its leaves ; and in the genus Four- 

 croya, which is nearly related to the American Aloes or Agaves, 

 a great number of bulbils are borne on the flower-stems, and 

 evidently supply the place of seeds. Offsets do not always 

 take the form of bulbs, however; for in many fruit-trees and 

 ornamental shrubs, offset-shoots or suckers, as they are techni- 

 cally called are produced from the underground stems or from 

 the roots, and much of the dense undergrowth in woods and 

 forests is produced in this manner. Sometimes nature takes 

 precautions to distribute her offsets just as she does her seeds, 

 and we see evidence of this in the garden and wood Straw- 

 berry, where the offsets are technically termed " runners," in 

 many grasses, in the " Sailor plant " (Saxifraga sarmentosa), in 

 the Goethe plant (Chlorophyton Sternbergiensis}, and many 

 others. This natural kind of division, or the production of 

 "offsets," "runners," "suckers," "stolons," or whatever they 

 may be called, is a wise and auxiliary force which often 

 succeeds in reproducing the plant under peculiar circum- 

 stances or conditions, where seeds or spores fail. Nor is this 

 kind of power confined to flowering-plants alone ; for Mush- 

 rooms and other fungi are reproduced by slender underground 

 threads (mycelium), which not unfrequently travel immense 

 distances before they find the peculiar conditions of nitro- 

 genous food, moisture, heat, or shade necessary for the full de- 

 velopment of the plant. Again, other cryptogamic plants, as 

 Ferns, of which Asplenium bulbifenim or Osmunda orientalis 

 may be cited as well-known examples, are viviparous, producing 

 young plants on the surface of their fronds, so that when the 

 old frond falls to the earth, these young individuals take root 



