The universe, or, The infinitely great and the infinitely little / by F.A. Pouchet.

  • Félix Archimède Pouchet
Date:
[1895]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The universe, or, The infinitely great and the infinitely little / by F.A. Pouchet. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    come shrubs and bushes, and then a verdant forest is soon seen rising in a district formerly stricken with sterility.^ The vital resistance of seeds, which varies between the widest extremes, comes also to the aid of dissemination. In fact, while there are some grains the organic development of which seems as if it could not be checked, and which are so impelled towards life that they germin- ate even on the plant which produces them, as we have seen is the case with the Rhizophorse; there are others which on the contrary yield embryos in the bosom of which life may slumber through a succession of ages. The seed of the coffee-tree, notwithstanding the thick coriaceous covering of its embryo, in a very short time loses the power of germinat- ing. Should the planter defer sowing only for a few days, the seed will be incapable of reproduction. But on the other hand some seeds, apparently less hardy, preserve their germinating power for a long time. Haricot beans have been obtained from seeds taken out of the herbarium of Tournefort, which could not have been less than one hundred years old. More delicate seeds resist destructive causes even much longer than this. A few years ago a successful attempt was made to grow seeds from the heliotrope, lucerne, and clover, which had been found in a Gallo- Roman tomb more than fifteen hundred years old. An analogous fact, which it seems impossible to doubt on account oi the high reputation of the botanist who relates it, is that which is men- tioned by Lindley. This savant assures us that seeds of the raspberry which had been taken from a Celtic burying-ground dating about seven- teen hundred years back, having been sown in the garden of the Horti- cultural Society of London, produced bushes of their species which are still to be seen. But life seems to make a still longer stay in the embryo of some other plants. Many learned men maintain that grains of wheat of such anti- ^ In my youth I travelled through the celebrated vaUey of Goldau in Switzerland, where, twenty years previously, a whole mountain had given way in the most frightful manner, crushing several viirages, and covering an immense space with fragments of broken rocks! All these rocks, lately quite bare, were already covered with a luxuriant vegetation, and the tortuous and uneven road which had been cleared through this vast sheet of ruin was everywhere smiling, and fresh, and covered with pines and shrubs of the most charming aspect. M. Boussingault mentions a similar instance which he observed in America. In ten years a mass of porphyry rocks, which had fallen down, was covered with massive acacias. —Boussingault, Economic Rurale. [Lees, on weighing together and separately a tuft of Bryum capillare and the soil attached to it, found that it had collected and retained on the tiled roof where it grew five times its own weight of humus.—Tr.]
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