GARDENING AS A SCIENCE. 
83 
be put an inch deep in water contained in an ounce-phial, a steady heat of seventy 
degrees will cause first the production of a ring of callus, and then, in a week, a 
complete brush of white fibres, radiating like a star from the ring. When these 
roots become the eighth of an inch long, the plant can be transferred to loam and 
heath mould, or the latter only if preferred, with greater probability of success than 
when the roots shall become six inches long in the water. 
Thirdly, Gloxinia will root from leaves, but it is better to take two-jointed 
cuttings with three leaves at the summit, removing those at the intermediate joint, 
and passing the knife just below and parallel with the lowest joint. 
The cutting being inserted, a joint deep, in a heat of seventy degrees, will in a few 
days develop, not a ring of callus, but a complete con- 
vexity not dissimilar to the leathery receptacle (torus) of 
a dandelion, after the pappus has been blown away. 
Fig. 2 will convey an idea of the node so produced : 
the upper part of the cutting, is taken up ; but this is 
indifferent as to success, for the small rudimental bud at 
the base of each footstalk will develop a shoot. After 
the production of the convex process small delicate fibrillas, of a texture so clear, 
yet firm, as to remind one of glass feather, gradually protrude ; and when these are 
a quarter of an inch long, the plant ought to go into the smallest, sixty or eighty, 
pot of pure black heath-soil, with a little sand in the hole where the roots repose. 
This callus is the origin of a complete bulb, tuber, or organised system, term 
it what we please. The stem, therefore, in producing it, contributes its whole 
substance of vitality ; for when the leaves fall, the stem withers, leaving a mass — 
a congeries of true Gloxinias, embedded like the eyes of a potato in a mass of 
nutrimental cellular and fibrous tissue. The cutting, therefore, of plants of this 
family does not produce buds, or roots from buds, but protrudes, at its base, its 
entire vital " organism," and in that all the rudiments of a future generation : 
here, then, there is continuous progression, but no new creation. 
Our article shall close with a quotation from Lindley's Theory of Horticulture, 
p. 202 — 3 ; in the latter there are three figures (a, b, c,) in proof of the emission 
of roots by leaves only. " Three are figured (20), viz., Gesnera Clianthus 
puniceus (b), Gloxinia speciosa (c). In these, and all such cases, the first thing 
that happens is an excessive development of cellular tissue, which forms a large 
convex ' callus ' at the base, from which, after a time, roots proceed, and by 
which eventually a leaf-bud, the commencement of a new stem, is generated." " It 
is not surprising that leaves should possess this quality, when we remember that 
every leaf does the same thing naturally while attached to the plant that bears it, 
that is to say, forms at its base a bud which is constantly axillary to itself. Leaves, 
however, have not been often employed as the means of propagating a species ; 
and it is probable that most leaves, when separated from their parent, are incapable 
of doing so, for reasons ivhich we are not yet able to explain." 
