Seedlings are
absolutely distinct individuals; they are the product of the pollen of
one plant and the ovules of another, and they start afresh in life with
some chance of being fairly free from 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 to--well, 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 multiplied into a whole colony of apparently
distinct individuals. 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.
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