lxxxii 



PHOCEEDINGS OF THE 



or individual varieties, against the ever-present causes of destruction, 

 and at the same time checks that over-multiplication which might 

 result from those very provisions. Those sudden appearances of 

 myriads of insects known in rural districts under the name of blight, 

 their enormous means of multiplication, and their almost total disap- 

 pearance the following season are as yet a mystery to us, both as 

 to their cause and their influences. The perusal of Mr. Darwin's 

 first chapters will show that there is much still to ascertain in the 

 action of insects even on our common Orchids ; and how little do we 

 know of the real history of the life of those sets of plants upon 

 whose external forms volumes have been published ! How is it that 

 when our hedges are annually loaded with the fruit of the bramble, 

 or our fields covered with the down of Carduits arvensis, we seldom 

 see a seedling of the one or the other ? — nature having concurrently 

 provided for their propagation by the inarching and rooting stems of 

 the former and the creeping rhizomes of the latter. How is it that 

 in many localities every individual Epilobium montanum, before it 

 dies down in the autumn, has surrounded itself not only by numerous 

 offshoots, each one armed against the rigours of winter so as to 

 form an independent new plant in the spring, but also by a wide- 

 spreading progeny already bom from the hundreds or even thousands 

 of seeds it has shed ; and yet when we examine the same spot the 

 following year, the number of Epilobiums has not increased, and you 

 may look long before you find among them a single seedling, every 

 individual you uproot proving to be the result of a previous year's off- 

 shoot ? In this excessive multiplication of autumn seedlings have we 

 perchance a provision in aid of insect or other animal life — some- 

 thing analogous to that concurrence of natural causes, which at one 

 of your last year's meetings was described as insect horticulture? 

 We usually close our observation of living plants in October, and 

 recommence it in March, when in many respects a total change has 

 taken place : the gradual progress of that change remains to be 

 Watched. I am well aware that numerous papers on the life and 

 development of plants have been published, more especially in 

 French and (German periodicals, and must be consulted by observers 

 before ttwy can safely (haw any conclusion; but many of these 

 treat the subject solely with a view to specific distinction, and 

 icarcely ever in relation to habits induced by external influences of 

 station :md climate, still less with reference to that connexion with 

 insect life revealed by Mr. Darwin. We have had enough of splitting 

 of hair and counting of spots, and of idle controversies as to whether 



