THE SEED. 175 
De Candolle, Dunal, Delille, Gordon, and Ch. Martins, have 
examined and studied in this small place in southern France 
many vegetable species belonging to the Flora of Buenos Ayres 
and Mexico. 
How long does the power of germination last in a seed? Some 
seeds rapidly lose their latent life, or, which comes to the same 
thing, the faculty of germination. There are others which, placed 
in the same‘circumstances, preserve their vitality for ages. 
The seeds of most plants of the Leguminous tribe will germinate 
many years after they are gathered. Every one has heard that 
the seeds of Beans, taken lately from the herbal collection of 
Tournefort, a celebrated botanist in the seventeenth century, ger- 
minated perfectly. In 1824 there were sown, at the Jardin des 
Plantes of Paris, some seeds of the Mimosa pudica which had 
been gathered at St. Domingo in 1738. 
If seeds are placed under special conditions, sheltered from 
atmospheric agency, in ground more or less dry and heaped up, 
for example, in tombs or catacombs, their vitality may be preserved 
for a prodigious time. It is a recognised fact that, after the 
destruction of a forest, we see a new sort of growth appear on the 
ground the forest used to occupy. It has been admitted, to explain 
this fact, that seeds of trees, buried in the ground while the forest 
existed, were preserved in the soil, with their life suspended during 
a considerable number of years; that, then awaking from their 
lethargic sleep, they have been developed under the influence of 
new conditions favourable to their germination. This hypothesis 
1s plausible enough in some cases, yet as no scientific experiment 
has been made on the subject, it might happen that in this case 
the second germination of trees was owing to the transport of 
foreign seeds, which germinated as soon as the soil had become 
free, and restored to light. 
ost marvellous examples are quoted of the longevity of 
seeds. Dr. Lindley, the learned botanist, asserts that some Raspberry 
seeds which were found in a Celtic tomb, and which numbered 
about seventeen hundred years of existence, had germinated per- 
fectly, and produced Raspberry plants, which still exist in the 
Horticultural Society’s Gardens in London. M. Ch. Desmoulins 
asserts that the seeds of the Lucerne, Cornflower, and Heliotrope 
