consequent seeds.

The same occurs in some inferior kinds of animals; as the aphises in
the spring and summer are viviparous for eight or nine generations,
which successively produce living descendants without sexual
intercourse, and are themselves, I suppose, without sex; at length in
the autumn they propagate males and females, which copulate and lay
eggs, which lie dormant during the winter, and are hatched by the
vernal sun; while the truffle, and perhaps mushrooms amongst
vegetables, and the polypus and taenia amongst insects, perpetually
propagate themselves by solitary reproduction, and have not yet
acquired male and female organs.

Philosophers have thought these viviparous aphides, and the taenia, and
volvox, to be females; and have supposed them to have been impregnated
long before their nativity within each other; so the taenia and volvox
still continue to produce their offspring without sexual intercourse.
One extremity of the taenia, is said by Linneus to grow old, whilst at
the other end new ones are generated proceeding to infinity like the
roots of grass. The volvox globator is transparent, and carries within
itself children and grandchildren to the fifth generation like the
aphides; so that the taenia produces children and grandchildren
longitudinally in a chain-like series, and the volvox propagates an
offspring included within itself to the fifth generation; Syst. Nat.

Many microscopic animals, and some larger ones, as the hydra or
polypus, are propagated by splitting or dividing; and some still
larger animals, as oysters, and perhaps eels, have not yet acquired
sexual organs, but produce a paternal progeny, which requires no
mother to supply it with a nidus, or with nutriment and oxygenation;
and, therefore, very accurately resemble the production of the buds of
trees, and the wires of some herbaceous plants, as of knot-grass and
of strawberries, and the bulbs of other plants, as of onions and
potatoes; which is further treated of in Phytologia, Sect. VII.

The manner in which I suspect the solitary reproduction of the buds of
trees to be effected, may also be applied to the solitary generation
of the insects mentioned above, and probably of many others, perhaps
of all the microscopic ones. It should be previously observed, that
many insects are hermaphrodite, possessing both male and female organs
of reproduction, as shell-snails and dew-worms; but that these are
seen reciprocally to copulate w