PLANT HYBRIDIZATION BEFORE MENDEL 45 



first Nicotiana hybrid, its much more rapid growth, whereby it 

 was distinguishable from its two parents, as he says, "from the 

 germinating seed on to its complete flowering." (p. 32.) 



Kolreuter seems to have interpreted the phenomenon of the 

 hybrid in a completely teleological way. The hybrid plant pro- 

 ceeds in its development normally like any other plant. 



"Even in the case of the most completely infertile hybrid the keenest 

 eye can discern no incompleteness, from the embryo up to flower forma- 

 tion, and yet the most important character, fertility, is lacking, a circum- 

 stance that would not be suspected from observation. But instead of an 

 expected number of some 50,000 seeds, none are obtained, and more than 

 a thousand flowers, one after another, are seen to fall, without leaving 

 a single capsule behind." (ib., pp. 43-4.) 



"Certainly," he says, "this event is, for a scientific investigator, one 

 of the most deserving of astonishment that has ever occurred upon the 

 wide field of nature." {ib., p. 44.) 



The wonderful and unexpected thing, however, to Kolreuter's 

 mind, lay not in the union of two materials, 



"which indeed were not destined for each other by the wise Creator," 

 but rather in the fact "that precisely this plant, when it has reached the 

 highest pitch of its completion, is not in condition to fulfill the final 

 object toward which otherwise all the operations demanded for de- 

 velopment appear to be directed, and, in all its apparent completeness, 

 betrays the greatest incompletion that a plant can ever happen upon. 

 This incompleteness consists chiefly in the total lack of good male and 

 female fertilizing material (Saamen), and in the infertility naturally 

 arising therefrom." {ib., p. 44.) 



Kolreuter's mind, however, reaches out into the conceived pre- 

 existing harmony of nature, which must be preserved at any 

 cost, and this apparent incompleteness becomes resolved into the 

 completeness of an orderly-minded creative agency which abhors 

 confusion of any kind, at least not of its own originating. He 

 proceeds further : 



"if one regards this event, however, from the point of view of its 

 consequences, then one will recognize with pleasure that this actual in- 

 completeness is real completeness. What an astonishing confusion would 

 not the peculiar and unchanged hybrid characters, and the continually 

 retained fertility of such plants give rise to in Nature." (p. 44.) . . . 

 "what evil and unavoidable consequences must these not draw after 

 them*?" {ib., p. 44.) 



Kolreuter turns from the contemplation of this embarrassing 

 picture, to raise what seemed to him a serious scientific question 

 that appeared to be involved. 



