332 LEAVES FROM MY NOTE-BOOK. 



variation, for the branches of the common moss-rose tree have 

 several times been known to produce Provence roses. The 

 common moss-rose, by bud variation, has produced three varie- 

 ties. Prof. Casparz has carefully described the case of a six-year- 

 old white moss-rose which sent up several suckers, one of which 

 was thorny and produced red fioivers destitute of moss, exactly like 

 that of the Provence rose ; another shoot bore both kinds of 

 flowers, and in addition longitudinally striped flowers. This white 

 moss-rose had been grafted on a Provence rose ; but how curious 

 is the fact that the influence of the stock lay dormant for six 

 years ! 



Sporting Potatoes (p. 410). — A single eye in a tuber of the old 

 Forty-fold potato, which is a purple variety, was observed to 

 become white. This eye was cut out and planted separately, and 

 the kind has since been largely propagated. A whole white tuber 

 was also produced by this variety of purple potato, and has been 

 propagated and kept true. Mr. R. Trail stated in 1867 that 

 several years ago he had cut about sixty blue and white potatoes 

 into halves through the eyes or buds, and then carefully joined 

 them, destroying at the same time the other eyes (p. 420). Some 

 of these united tubers prpduced white and others blue tubers. 

 Some, however, produced tubers partly white and partly blue, and 

 the tubers from four or five were regularly mottled with the two 

 colours. In these latter cases we may conclude, says Darwin, that 

 a stem had been formed by the union of the bisected buds — that 

 is, by graft-hybridisation. 



Mr. Taylor, who had received several accounts of potatoes 

 having been grafted by wedge-shaped pieces of one variety inserted 

 into another, though sceptical on the subject, made twenty-four 

 experiments, which he described in detail before the Horticultural 

 Society. He thus raised many new varieties — some like the 

 graft and some like the stock, others having an intermediate cha- 

 racter. (Can anything demonstrate more forcibly that the prin- 

 ciple of heredity and the power of variation are distributed 

 throughout the somatic cells ?) Several persons witnessed the 

 digging up of the tubers from these graft-hybrids, and one of them, 

 Mr. Jameson, a large dealer in potatoes, writes thus : — " They 

 were such a mixed lot as I have never before or since seen. They 



