The Origin of Striped Flowers. 117 
white flowers with red stripes, I have seen a head whose 
outer ray florets were dark red whilst the inner ones 
formed a disc of pure white with only very occasional 
red stripes. In the center the unmodified fertile yellow 
disc florets were seen. I have observed the same phe- 
nomenon in a few other 'cases. 
The striped varieties of Cyclamen persicum are said 
to bear in some instances only variegated flowers one 
year and from the same bulb uniformly colored atavistic 
flowers the next year. 
Centaurea Cyanns, the blue corn flower or blue bottle, 
has a brown variety with double flowerheads which is 
/ 
highly variable in color; it is far from being fixed yet, 
as a plantbreeder in Erfurt expressed it to me. I culti- 
vated it for five years, always selecting the purest and 
darkest brown specimens in small numbers as seed- 
parents. The race produced reversions to the blue form 
every year. Some plants bore blue flowers exclusively, in 
others the blue color appeared in segments or in stripes 
on some of the heads. No advance was brought about 
by this selection. 
The examples given must suffice to show the impor- 
tance of the striped flowers of horticulture. A Var. 
striata of a number of species is advertised in the cata- 
logues ; it is open to any one, therefore, to cultivate them. 
The Var. alba of many other species often reveals on 
closer inspection scattered stripes of the color of the 
parent species; these stripes can easily be intensified by 
isolation and selection as I shall show in one of the 
following sections ( 16). 
Str-iped flowers 1 are also of great importance in the 
1 Spotted flowers may possibly behave differently ; but up to the 
present time I have not grown them. 
