106 OF BUDS. 



excellent man to observe every thing, without refe- 

 rence to any theory, and his book is a storehouse of 

 facts relating to vegetation. Loefling, a favourite pupil 

 of Linnaeus, wrote, under the eye of his great teacher, 

 an essay on this subject, published in the Amcemtates 

 Academics, v. 2, in which the various forms of buds, 

 and the different disposition of the leaves within them, 

 are illustrated by numerous examples. The Abbe de 

 Ramatuelle had taken up this subject with great zeal 

 at Paris, about twenty years ago, but the result of his 

 inquiries has not reached me. 



Dr. Darwin, Phytologia, sect. 9, has many acute ob- 

 servations on the physiology of buds, but he appears 

 to draw the analogy too closely between them and the 

 embryo of a seed, or the chick in the egg. By buds 

 indeed, as we well know, plants are propagated, and 

 in that sense each bud is a separate being, or a young 

 plant in itself; but such propagation is only the exten- 

 sion of an individual, and not a reproduction of the 

 species as by seed. Accordingly, all plants increased 

 by buds, cuttings, layers or roots, retain precisely the 

 peculiar qualities of the individual to which they owe 

 their origin. If those qualities differ from what are 

 common to the species, sufficiently to constitute what 

 is called a variety, that variety is perpetuated through 

 all the progeny thus obtained. This fact is exemplified 

 in a thousand instances, none more notorious than the 

 different kinds of Apples, all which are varieties of the 

 common Crab, Pyrus Mains, Engl. Bot. t. 179 ; and 



