THE VEGETABLE AND ANIMAL KINGDOMS. 151 



saw ears resembling barley, but with grains similar to rye, 

 growing from the same stem ivith ears of wheat. 1 Dr. Lindley, 

 who publishes these facts, acknowledges there being no theo- 

 retical improbability in such transformations, seeing that, " in 

 orchidaceous plants, forms just as different as wheat, barley, 

 rye, and oats, have been proved by the most rigorous evidence 

 to be accidental variations of one common form, brought 

 about no one knows how, but before our eyes, and rendered 

 permanent by equally mysterious agency." : It is more than 

 probable that the greater number of what may be called the 

 domesticated plants, are unsuspected variations of others, 

 which, growing wild, are recognised as different species. One 

 noted instance of such transition has been detected in our dif- 

 ferent kinds of cabbage, savoy, broccoli, and cauliflower. They 

 are all common descendants of a plant which is sometimes 

 found growing wild upon our sea-shores, the Brassica oleracea 

 a transition which no one can appreciate till he has com- 

 pared the tough slender stem and small glaucous leaf of the 

 original, with the stout fleshy stem and large succulent leaves, 

 sometimes gathered into a heart several feet in circumference, 

 which he will find in the most familiar of the cabbages. 



What respect, it may be asked, can we attach to the doctrine 

 of intransibility of species, when we find its adherents wrong 



1 Gardeners' Chronicle, 1846, p. 118. The witness in this case signs 

 himself, C. Wayth, Bursted House, Maidstone. See p. 102 of the same 

 volume ; also the Gardeners' Chronicle for August and September, 1844, 

 where an experiment by Lord Arthur Hervey is recorded. See, further, 

 the Magazine of Natural History, newserieSj i. 574, and Reports of Kay 

 Society, 1846, p. 381. 



2 After these facts had been presented in several editions of the pre- 

 sent work, challenged on merely speculative grounds, but never truly 

 shaken, botanists were astonished, in 1852, by the announcement of 

 M. Fabre, that an experiment conducted by him during twelve years 

 with the wild grass, jBgilops ovata, had resulted in its transition into 

 true wheat, " of such quality as was not excelled on the neighbouring 

 farms." The philosophical consequence deduced by the Gardeners' 

 Chronicle of Dr. Lindley, is that "faith in those lower classes of bota- 

 nical distinctions which have been said to represent permanent natural 

 differences, is gone." "Kye," says this writer, "is less different from 

 wheat than is segilops, and may very well be another segilopian form. 

 So again of barley, the wild state of which is j ust as uncertain ; we may 

 now expect that some clever experimenter will trace it to an origin as 

 surprising as that of wheat." 



Professor Henslow repeated some of M. Fabre's experiments, and so 

 far succeeded in changing the character of JSgilops squarrosa as to give 

 him assurance that the announced result was "not without founda- 

 tion." Eep. Brit. Assoc. Chelt., p. 87. 



