REJOINDER TO MR. MEARNS. 
352 
nished with at least two feet of fine last-year’s wood, and this was left 
above the surface of the soil. Third , as the object of the experiment 
was to ascertain the power of rooting individually possessed by each, 
no pains were taken to excite early growth with a view to fruit, and 
therefore no heat was applied. On the 4th of March, however, both 
pots were plunged to their rims into a bed of the leaves of beech and 
oak, in a peach-pit, and the glasses were put on;—no other mode was 
resorted to. The leaves did not ferment to any great degree, and 
therefore but little bottom-heat was generated. As the power of the 
sun increased, (though the extremely cold and wet weather of April 
was very unfavourable to growth,) the vines became excited, and the 
eyes upon the shoot above the soil, attached to the coil whose spurs and 
buds remained entire, pushed with great vigour, and showed several 
good bunches of fruit. The disbudded coil remained torpid, but at 
length came into feeble action; the shoots it produced were always 
feeble—little or no signs of fruit were afforded, and it made no way. 
The perfect coil continued to support its leaves and clusters, and there¬ 
fore it evidently had developed efficient roots; but unfortunately the 
progress of the fruit was arrested by the attacks of slugs, which the 
leaves concealed; they destroyed the clusters before the blossoms ex¬ 
panded. As it appeared evident after midsummer, that the dis¬ 
budded plant would not do any good—the growing vine having lost its 
fruit—the rods above the soil were cut down very low, and only one 
green shoot from a spur of the best plant was left. On the 8th instant 
both the pots were taken from the leaves, and their coils examined;— 
that of the disbudded plant had a sufficiently abundant supply of fine, 
strong, and white roots of recerit formation, but there were many joints 
entirely destitute of fibres. The perfect coil was furnished throughout 
its entire extent, from the lowest extremity to the point of emergence 
from the soil, with masses of long fibrous processes emerging chiefly 
from the bases of the eyes, and exactly at the points where the clusters 
of embryo-buds are usually situated ; almost all the eyes had been 
either absorbed, or were greatly diminished in size; not one had pro¬ 
duced an under-ground shoot ; and we traced a very large root, which 
afforded the strongest ground to believe that it had been originally a 
lateral eye; it differed entirely from the ordinary radical processes, 
emerged at a point close to the base of an eye upon a small spur, was 
three times as thick as a common root, and much resembled the root¬ 
stocks which produce the tubers of the potato :—we have preserved it, 
with the spur, in spirit, as a physiological curiosity. It is with plea¬ 
sure that we give Mr. Mearns all the benefit of this comparative 
experiment, claiming merely the great efficiency of buds in effectuating 
