326 
ON RAISING VINES FROM EYES OR SINGLE BUDS. 
ON RAISING VINES FROM EYES OR SINGLE BUDS. 
This is an old expedient for raising young trees, recommended by 
Miller, Speechly, and others. Every one acquainted with the vegeta¬ 
tive powers and structure of the vine, can readily conceive that every 
bud having the smallest portion of the last year’s alburnum and liber 
attached, will emit fibres, and develope the bud into a new individual 
plant. 
As a bud with a piece of the wood is, next to a seed, the smallest 
living member which can be separated from a parent tree, it has been 
supposed to inherit more of the purity of youth , and less of any consti¬ 
tutional disease, or of any decrepitude from age to which the tree 
whence it has been taken may have been accidentally subject. Whether 
there be any well-founded reason for this supposition, so as to give cause 
for such a precaution, is difficult to guess, as it appears to be a practice 
rather based on an assumed probability, than from any positive proof 
or sign that the grape vine is subject to any constitutional disease, which 
is sought by this practice to be avoided. 
Vines may be seen of all ages, some of them extremely old, and often 
in situations where they are exposed to all kinds of injury from domestic 
animals and mischievous boys, namely, in court-yards and on street- 
houses, cramped in their stems by close pavement, and at their root by 
hard beds of gravel, and all manner of builders’ rubbish. Yet, notwith¬ 
standing these unfavourable accompaniments, we never see a diseased 
vine: it may be gnawed, browsed, and mutilated in every kind of way, 
but we never observe among those external injuries anything like 
internal disorganisation, as a cutting taken from the oldest and most 
disfigured stump will become as healthy a young tree as any cutting 
whatever. To propagate from eyes, to get rid of disease or the in¬ 
firmity of age, therefore, seems a futile proceeding, and by no means 
productive of that superior soundness which the practice seeks to 
obtain. 
But, say the advocates for striking vines from eyes, these trees are 
subject to be preyed on by several kinds of hurtful insects, and which 
may be transferred from old to young plants bv taking large pieces of 
the shoots for either cuttings or layers. There may be some semblance 
of reason in this; but surely the red acarus, the thrip, aphis, or any 
species of coccus, are as likely to infest a plant raised from an eye, as 
from those raised in any other way. Again, it is argued that, whether 
a cutting or layer be used, a considerable part of the old wood must ever 
remain a part of the young tree; and if, like other trees, the oldest parts 
