. Falling in love [microform] : with other essays on more exact branches of science. Science; Science. I I i i 222 DE BANANA I â. i 3 I f f 5 viduals; they are the i^roduct of the pollen of one plant and the ovules of another, and they start afresh in life with some chance of being fairly free jfrom the hereditary taints or personal failings of either parent. But cuttings or suckers are only the same old plant over and over again in fresh circumstances, transplanted as it were, but not truly renovated or rejuvenescent. That is the real reason why our potatoes are now all going toâwell, the sam
. Falling in love [microform] : with other essays on more exact branches of science. Science; Science. I I i i 222 DE BANANA I â. i 3 I f f 5 viduals; they are the i^roduct of the pollen of one plant and the ovules of another, and they start afresh in life with some chance of being fairly free jfrom the hereditary taints or personal failings of either parent. But cuttings or suckers are only the same old plant over and over again in fresh circumstances, transplanted as it were, but not truly renovated or rejuvenescent. That is the real reason why our potatoes are now all going toâwell, the same place as the army has been going ever since the earliest memories of the oldest officer in the whole service. We have gone on growing potatoes over and over again from the tubers alone, and hardly ever from seed, till the whole constitution of the potato kind has become permanently enfeebled by old age and dotage. The eyes (as farmers call them) are only buds or underground branches; and to plant potatoes as we usually do is nothing more than to multiply the apparent scions by fission. Odd as it may sound to say so, all the potato vines in a whole field are often, from the strict biological point of view, parts of a single much- divided individual. It is just as though one were to go on cutting up a single worm, time after time, as soon as he grew again, till at last the one original creature had mul- tiplied into a whole colony of apparently distinct indivi- duals. Yet, if the first worm happened to have the gout or the rheumatism (metaphorically speaking), all the other worms into which his compound personality had been divided would doubtless suffer from the same complaints throughout the whole of their joint lifetimes. The banana, however, has very long resisted the inevit- able tendency to degeneration in plants thus artificially and unhealthily propagated. Potatoes have only been in culti- vation for a few hundred years; and yet the potato constitution has become so f
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Keywords: ., bookauthoral, bookcentury1800, bookdecade1890, booksubjectscience
