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Updated: June 28, 2025
As far as the preservation of a species is concerned, and the reproduction of the individual, the asexual methods, budding, for example, would have done well enough. But when it comes to enacting a different individual apart from the effects of environment, sex stands out as the favored method of Life.
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.
These are all cases of asexual multiplication, and there are other instances, and still more extraordinary ones, in which this process takes place naturally, in a more hidden, a more recondite kind of way. You are all of you familiar with those little green insects, the 'Aphis' or blight, as it is called.
In all the different forms of asexual reproduction from fission to parthenogenesis, the female may in this sense be said to exist alone and perform all the functions of life including reproduction.
Asexual multiplications, although very common with perennial plants, appear not to offer important material for selection. Hence it follows that in comparing the work of nature with that of man, the results of selection followed by vegetative propagation should always be carefully excluded.
The cause lies in the enormous difficulties attached to grafting or budding of these trees, which make this method very expensive and to a high degree uncertain and unsatisfactory. After this hasty survey of the more reliable facts of the practice of an asexual multiplication of the extremes of fluctuating variability, we may now return to the previously mentioned theoretical considerations.
In each of these passages it is plain that the difficulty of separating the personality of the offspring from that of the parent plant is present to his mind. Yet, p. 351 of the same volume as above, he tells us that asexual generation "is effected in many ways by the formation of buds of various kinds, and by fissiparous generation, that is, by spontaneous or artificial division."
These are all cases of asexual multiplication, and there are other instances, and still more extraordinary ones, in which this process takes place naturally, in a more hidden, a more recondite kind of way. You are all of you familiar with those little green insects, the 'Aphis' or blight, as it is called.
The method of the perpetuation of organic beings is of two kinds, the asexual and the sexual. In the first the perpetuation takes place from and by a particular act of an individual organism, which sometimes may not be classed as belonging to any sex at all.
Unlike some authorities who must be heard with respect, I can say with confidence that some of the noblest, happiest and most romantic marriages I know base their control of conception not on contraceptives but on abstinence. They are not prigs, they are not asexual, they do not drift apart, and they have no harsh criticism to make on those who have decided otherwise.
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