to planting an apple seed. Going to the tree of the variety he
desires, he takes from it a small twig provided with a bud and inserts
this bud into a cleft made in the young branch of another apple tree.
The young bud so inserted starts up into a new branch, resembling
almost absolutely, not the tree which feeds it with sap, but the tree
from which the bud was originally taken.

When we wish a particular variety of potato we obtain pieces of the
potato of the kind we desire. Each of these must contain an eye, which
is a bud of the old potato. When the sprout appears the new plant will
be practically identical in character with the plant from which the
potato was taken. This sort of reproduction, in which a piece of the
old parent grows up into the new generation, is called the asexual
method. But one parent is concerned in the process, and the offspring
are as nearly as may be like the parent from which they arose.

The gardener who wishes to obtain new varieties is not content with
this method. If he plant the seed of the potato the outcome will be
most uncertain. His seed must be taken, of course, from the fruit of
the potato, and most of these plants never fruit. Every grower of
large quantities of potatoes will have noticed occasionally, on the
tops of the plant, after the flowers disappear, a globular growth
looking not unlike a small tomato, but with a tendency to become
purplish green in color. This is the fruit of the potato and in it are
the seeds. When these are planted all sorts of potatoes are liable to
start up. Most of them will prove worthless. An occasional seed may
produce an uncommonly fine plant. This new variety may thereafter be
propagated from the tuber, as the potato itself is called, and the new
strain will be kept constant in this way. This method of using the
seed for reproducing the plant is called the sexual method, because
two parents cooeperate in the production of the seed. The pollen came
from one parent and the ovule, which after fertilization swelled up
into the seed, came from another. By this combination of two
individuals new varieties become quite possible. Nature seems to be
more concerned in improving her strain than in maintaining her older
strains. In all of her lowest plants and animals she uses the asexual
method of reproduction. As we go higher in the organic world the
two-parent method becomes increasingly common. When we reach the
higher animals, and most of the higher pl