PLANT HYBRIDIZATION BEFORE MENDEL 41 



of the wind. Kolreuter then describes, in very considerable detail, 

 the pollination process in Iris, in the mallows, and in the water- 

 lilies. In Argemone, Hypericum, Oenothera, Epilobium, Polemo- 

 nium, Echium, Hyoscyamus, Nicotiana, Antirrhinum, Scrophularia 

 and others, certain details of the pollination process are more 

 briefly remarked upon. The general discussion of pollination 

 concludes as follows : 



"Everywhere, insects are always involved, in the case of plants in 

 which pollination does not ordinarily occur through direct contact ; and 

 they have the most to do with their pollination, and consequently also 

 with their fertilization, and probably they furnish, if not to all plants, 

 at least to a very great part of them, this uncommonly great service : 

 for almost all flowers belonging here carry something with them that is 

 agreeable to insects, and one will not easily find one of them with which 

 they are not to be found in quantity." (p. 28.) 



Kolreuter now begins his discussion of hybrids. Many so-called 

 hybrids are probably products of the imagination. There are per- 

 haps scarcely any among them which might rightly deserve this 

 name. 



"How can one give them out with certainty as such," he says, "before 

 one has produced them through art and, indeed, through the most un- 

 remitting experiments." (p. 29.) 



The First ''Mule Plant." 



In rather naive fashion Kolreuter describes the reasons which 

 led him to experiment upon the breeding of plants. He calls at- 

 tention to the fact that man has brought together, in botanical 

 and zoological gardens, plants and animals from all quarters of 

 the earth. With animals, this has given rise to the possibility of 

 making hybrids. The history of Kol renter's first hybridization ex- 

 periment is given as follows : 



"As improbable as it is, that of two different kinds of animals, which 

 have lived in their natural freedom, a hybrid should ever have been 

 produced, so improbable is it also that, in the orderly arrangement that 

 nature has made in the plant kingdom, a hybrid plant should have 

 arisen. Nature, which always, even in the greatest apparent disorder, 

 adheres to the most beautiful order, has precluded this confusion, in the 

 case of wandering animals, aside from other means, through the natural 

 instincts, and in the case of plants, in which their all too close proximity, 

 the wind, and insects, give a daily opportunity for an unnatural inter- 

 mixture, she will without doubt have known, through just as certain 

 means, how to take away their force from the operations to be feared 

 therefrom. Presumably, aside from the natural instincts, they are just 

 the same as occur with animals. Perhaps it has also been one of her 

 designs to preclude such a disarrangement to be feared therefrom, that 





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