PERPETUAL STRAWBERRIES. 
819 
on the very border between herbaceous and shrubby plants. 
Potentillas, which are next to them in the botanical classification, 
have a still wider range of organisation; some of them, as P. 
anserina, being perfect herbs, and some others, as P. fruticosa , 
being decidedly shrubs with woody permanent stems. Straw¬ 
berries are mostly placed just on the intermediate step between 
the two. Their short-jointed, thick stems bear from eight to twelve 
leaves, at the axil of which a bud exists, which seldom becomes 
abortive, and mostly develops either into a branch similar to the 
main stem, or into a runner, or into a flower stem, these appen¬ 
dages being in a manner equivalent to and, so to speak, inter¬ 
changeable with one another. 
The runner at first sight appears as different as possible from 
the ordinary leaf-bearing stem : it becomes very plain, however, 
upon closer inspection, that it is merely an elongated branch, 
dissimilar to the original one simply in the great length of 
the internodes and in the diminutive size of the leaves, which 
are mostly reduced to mere bracts. But the runners show their 
identity with the normal branches in producing from their knots 
exactly the same appendages as the primitive stems do, viz. 
regular stems, runners, and even flower stems, and in bearing 
also abortive axillary buds occasionally. A vegetable axis 
which reproduces another axis similar to the one from which it 
proceeded cannot be called really different from it in nature. 
Now it is the case both in the Alpine and in the large-fruited 
Strawberry that runners issuing from the normal stems produce 
from some of their axillary buds new stems exactly similar to 
the original stems. 
The Large-fruited Strawberry. 
The vegetative organs are in the largeffruited Strawberry in 
the same organic relation to one another as in the alpine. 
There is consequently no reason why the same characteristics 
should appear in the one and fail to appear in the other. 
Barring the greater thickness of the runners and flower stems 
(which in either species are respectively very like to one another) 
the relations of number, position, and growth are just the same 
in both. 
This is reason enough why the creation of perpetual varieties 
Gr 2 
