

24 GOETHE ON THE METAMORPHOSIS OF PLANTS. 
easily detected in the bud, it is nevertheless present no less than in the 
seed; and, especially under the influence of moisture, the root is easily 
and rapidly produced. 
89. The bud requires no cotyledons, because it is connected with 
the parent plant (now in a state of complete organization), and re- 
ceives nourishment from it so long as this connection lasts ; when se- 
parated from it, nourishment is supplied either by the plant on which 
it is grafted, or if planted in the soil, by roots which are immediately 
formed. 
90. The bud is composed of nodes and leaves more or less developed, 
by means of which the plant continues to increase in size. Thus we 
may consider the lateral branches which arise from the nodes, as dis- 
tinet little plants established on the parent-plant, in the same way as the 
parent-plant itself is established in the soil.* 
91. The resemblance and the difference which exist between the seed 
and the bud, have been often, and especially of late, the subject of such 
able and exact investigations, that we can but appeal to them here with 
unqualified approbation. 
92. We will but state what follows. Nature makes an obvious 
difference in highly-organized plants between buds and seeds; but if 
we descend to plants of a simpler structure, the difference between them 
is imperceptible to the eye of even the most acute observer. There are 
unequivocal seeds, and there are unequivocal propagative buds; but the 
point is a purely ideal one, at which buds which simply push their way 
out from the parent-plant and separate from it without any apparent, 
cause, become one, as regards their inherent functions, with fertilized 
and disengaged seeds. 
93. Having well weighed these things, we may venture to infer that 
* The individuality of the buds seems to have been suspected by Hippocrates ; who 
remarked the similarity between the branch aud a small tree,— 
"AAN abrbs ó kAdôos early orep kal rd dévdpov &xeı.—De Natura Pueri. 
The doctrine that a plant is a compound being, a combination of individuals, has 
been —— in later times by La Hire, Goethe, Darwin, Du Petit Thouars, 
De Candolle, Gaudichand, and others; while Sars, Steenstrup, Owen, Forbes, ete., 
among zoologists, have indicated analogous phenomena in the animal kingdom. 
These authors consider the formation of a series of buds as a process of vegetative 
reproduction alternating with, or intervening between, that which is the result of the 
era piba See Owen on Parthenogenesis ; Forbes, * Monograph of the Naked- 
^ 
ge edusæ, p. 87; A. Braun, “Rejuvenescence in Nature,’ Ray Society ‘Transl. 
T Gærtner, ‘De Fructibus et Seminibus Plantarum,’ cap. 1. 
