That such modifications may increase and may persist through many generations, even with asexual multiplication, depends upon the fact that the budding cells contain germ-plasm, as well as the germ-cells, and if particular determinants of the germ-plasm in general are caused to vary by these new influences, the variation may be transmitted from bud to bud, from shoot to shoot, and so go on increasing as long as the new conditions persist, as well as in amphigonic (bisexual) reproduction, where they are transmitted from germ-cell to germ-cell. It is not inconceivable that an individual adaptation, that is to say a useful adjustment, might be effected in the course of asexual reproduction, although it is improbable that direct influences would give rise to just those changes which would be useful under the new conditions. But there are a number of cases which have been interpreted in this way. In several of the cultivated plants named, the reproductive organs have themselves degenerated, either only the male, or only the female, or both at the same time; and some observers, accepting the hypothesis of an inheritance of functional modifications, have regarded this as the direct result of disuse during the long period of asexual reproduction. Leaving out of account this erroneous presupposition, we may ask how asexual reproduction, such as that of the potato by tubers instead of by seed, which has gone on exclusively for several centuries, could exercise any influence upon the flowers and seed-forming of this species? In point of fact it has exercised none in most potatoes, for the flowers and seeds are just as fertile now as they were when the potato was first discovered.