THE SEED AND THE BUD.

Colonist, Issue 41, 12 March 1858, Page 3

THE SEED AND THE BUD.

(From tilt Montrose Standard ) Dr. Harvey, of Aberdeen, now settled at Southampton, has lately brought out two short and very elegant little books, entering fully into rather a new view of the origin of vegetable life, and particularly the mode of its development. The propagation of its kind is an instinct and a process of organization impressed by the hand of the Creator upon^ all His animal and vegetable life'; but this law is differently carried out in the different orders and races of creation. Nature is always harmonious in her action; but her variety in applying it is almost infinite within the wide boundaries of certain physical principles, which she never transgresses. There is a progression from the simplest forms of organisms up to the most complicated and delicate frames of the higher orders ; and the operations for renewing the individuals of these races are just as various as the modes of sustaining the frames when originated. The giant forms of the forest trees, growing for centuries, and accumulating masses of matter so huge as to make the largest animal productions look like pigmies, arc nourished we scai'ce know how. " The scent of water," as the Scripture describes it, —the ethereal gases of the air—the invisible particles of mineral combinations imbibed and assimilated by a vast series of pores and valves —rear up this mighty vegetable structure ; while the animal frame requires food of a grosser kind to be prepared for its nourishment, through a series of changes by the inferior races, who seem to live and die but for their support. Can we, then, wonder that, if we go back to the'origin of the individuals, equal variety will be found in the embryo of their development ? Descending to the vegetable kingdom, we recognise hv-tho general law of reproduction, of which we avail ourselves in the modern practice of hybridising, the distinct employment of sexual development insulting in. the seed or fruitful germ of future life. The plant " whose seed is in itself," trusts it, like the egg of the ostrich, to the shifting sands, the changeful elements, and the rapacious enemies for whom it is food ; yet the stately cedar .rises-, from the little winged nodule which descends from the parent cone. The object of this paper is to open up another view of the increase and perpetuation of the vegetable fabric of the goodly timber. The first striking fact which attracts the observer is the simple detached character of the bud or germ in a growing plant, which being generated concurrently with the ripening of the shoot in the autumn, is developed in the spring into a decided increment of its structure, between which, and the old fabric upon which it is as. it w,ere engrafted, there is a complete distinction. The next fact is the connection of the bud and its development, which we have described with the ring or circle of external wood, which year by year is added to the structui'e of the tree, and the interchangeable character of this development into leaves or roots, according to its exposure to the light and air at the point of the branch, or its secretion in a damp crevice or crack, as proved in the elm, the ash, the birch, &c, where it immediately assumes the character of roots. Such is the outline of Dr. Harvey's theory in his book upon trees, which it is difficult to explain without his interesting illustrative diagrams. The full deductions from his observations, literally supporting the Scripture similies of the perpetuity of a nation, "as the days of a tree are the clays of my people," Dr. Harvey explains in his theory that, but for accident, the vegetable existence of a tree is interminable. True, the internal structure ceases, after a certain number of years, when it attains what may be called its profitable maturity, even to pass the sap to the extremities, and becomes hollow and rotten, but how many oaks with their blackened chambers, in the royal forests, bear a crown of vigorous young wood and fresh foilage, laying on still the annual layer of external camberine, and widening the internal vacuity. Witness the effect upon one of these ancient monai'chs of the forest, which appear to renew their age by fresh enrichment of the soil around, and stretch their arms in juvenile vigour, regai'dless of the hoi-, low evidence of age within. The tree, then, according to this theory, is in truth an annual plant, the yearly increment answering in all respects to • a new offspring of vital energy, though embracing the framework of former vegetative energy; arid if we examine farther, we shall find that, once originated, the stock which the seed produces is susceptible of resuscitation or reproduction almost indiscriminately by the seed of the bud, which we plant: in the shape of a cutting, and which exactly like the seecl sends' its shoots upwards, and its root downwards, with equal vigour. Botanical research accurately applied would no doubt find technical differences in the organic structure of this generical generation, as the reproduction by the bud has been called, as in our herbaceous or semi-herbaceous plants, which probably do not die down annually in their own climate, but enlarge their structure, like trees, while the bulbous tribes are reproduced by the roots, instead of buds, in addition to the seeds. These are but samples of the infinite variety of the working of the objects, of creation. It is in illustration of that variety that the interchangeable character of the bud or seed, as a medium of reproduction or prolongation of'existence in perennial vegetation, js brought forward—a character recognised incidentally by De Candolle and Lindley, but beautifully dWeloped and traced to physiological consequences by Dr. Harvey.