Page:Micrographia - or some physiological descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses with observations and inquiries thereupon.djvu/191

Rh seminal principle from which this minute Plant on Rose leaves did spring, were, before the corruption caus'd by the Mill-dew, a component part of the leaf on which it grew, and did serve as a coagent in the production and constitution of it, yet might it be so consummate, as to produce a seed which might have a power of propagating the same species: the works of the Creator seeming of such an excellency, that though they are unable to help to the perfecting of the more compounded existence of the greater Plant or Animal, they may have notwithstanding an ability of acting singly upon their own internal principle, so as to produce a Vegetable body, though of a less compounded nature, and to proceed so farr in the method of other Vegetables, as to bear flowers and seeds, which may be capabale of propagating the like. So that the little cases which appear to grow on the top of the slender stalks, may, for ought I know, though I should suppose them to spring from the perverting of the usual course of the parent Vegetable, contain a seed, which, being scatter'd on other leaves of the same Plant, may produce a Plant of much the same kind.

Nor are Damask-Rose leaves the onely leaves that produce these kinds of Vegetable sproutings; for I have observ'd them also in several other kinds of Rose leaves, and on the leaves of several sorts of Briers, and on Bramble leaves they are oftentimes to be found in very great clusters; so that I have found in one cluster, three, four, or five hundred of them, making a very conspicuous black spot or scab on the back side of the leaf.

He Blue and White and several kinds of hairy mouldy spots, which are observable upon divers kinds of putrify'd bodies, whether Animal substances, or Vegetable, such as the skin, raw or dress'd, flesh, bloud, humours, milk, green Cheese, &c. or rotten sappy Wood, or Herbs, Leaves, Barks, Roots, &c. of Plants, are all of them nothing else but several kinds of small and variously figur'd Mushroms, which, from convenient materials in those putrifying bodies, are, by the concurrent heat of the Air, excited to a certain kind of vegetation, which will not be unworthy our more serious speculation and examination, as I shall by and by shew. But, first, I must premise a short description of this Specimen, which I have added of this Tribe, in the first Figure of the XII. Scheme, which is nothing else but the appearance of a small white spot of hairy mould, multitudes of which I found to bespeck & whiten over the red covers of a small book, which, it seems, were of Sheeps-skin, that being more apt to gather mould, even in a dry and clean room, then other leathers. These spots appear'd, through a good Microscope, to be a very pretty shap'd Vegetative body, which, from almost the same part of the Leather, shot Rh