PRUNING. 247 



are produced, and stopped at the joint above the fruit 

 as before : these, in their turn, are cut back in the 

 year following, and again and again, so long as they 

 continue fruitful, and do not overshade too much the 

 interior of the house. 



When the practical man is employed in thus dress- 

 ing the vine by divesting the tree of all leading and 

 superfluous shoots, for the express purpose of enlarg- 

 ing and perfecting the fruit at the summit of every 

 shoot, he is puzzled to understand that dictum of 

 science which affirms that " the matter " which in- 

 creases the stem and fruit thereon, "descends:" 

 because if this maxim be right, his practice is 

 evidently wrong. So must stripping gooseberry and 

 currant trees of their summer shoots, with a similar 

 view, be injudicious. But in the case of the vine, it 

 is not likely that such management will ever be 

 abandoned. 



But a remarkable property of the vine is its power 

 of yielding fruit from latent or invisible buds, pro- 

 vided the stern be in a suitable situation for receiving 

 sufficient air, light, and heat. In a former part of this 

 volume it has been assumed, that terminal flower 

 buds require periods of one, two, or many years to 

 perfect themselves before expansion. Here we have 

 an instance of latent buds issuing from the nodes of 

 the old stems without exposure to either air or light, 

 save what they receive through the vascular struc- 

 ture of the stem itself. This, however, is, it appears, 

 sufficient for the preparatory maturation of the fruc- 

 tiferous parts of the vine. The difference in the con- 



