268 TRANSACTIONS OF THE HORTICULTURAL 



V 



IIYBRIDITY IN THE ALMOND FAMILY. 



BY D. B. WIER, LACON. 



In looking up the fertilization, or poUenizatiou, o£ the flowers 

 of the native plums, I have gathered some queer fancies, or theories, 

 perhaps facts. They are mostly founded on careful personal obser- 

 vation, be they facts or not. 



All of our cultivated stone-fruits are included in the Almond 

 family. All of these have so-called perfect flowers, which means 

 flowers with perfect, regular sexuality — flowers which have the male 

 organs, sfinnes, and female organs, pistils — fully developed in each 

 flower, and each flower capable of fertilizing or poUenizing its own 

 ovaries, and it has usually been considered that each flower does per- 

 form this function for itself. But my studies of these flowers have 

 convinced me that they are not usually fertile with their own pol- 

 len. 



I do not mean by this that I consider no flower of this family 

 capable of being fertilized with its own pollen, but I conclude from 

 observation that the flowers of the family, and of the whole order 

 — roseacea' — to which it belongs, are, as a rule, more fertile with 

 pollen from another flower on the same plant, or that from another 

 variety of the same species, and, in some instances, as is certainly 

 the case in the tribe prunus of this family, from another species. 



Botauy is considered an exact science, founded on absolute laws; 

 but the student will soon find that it is exact in nothing. That is, 

 he will find exceptions to all, yes, I may say all, rules and laws, or 

 very nearly so. Therefore, many of us have been tied, hand, foot 

 and mind, in our studies of vegetable life. That this is true, and a 

 great drawback to our full understanding of nature's ways, I could 

 go on and give absolute, abundant proof. Therefore, I ask, that for 

 a time, you all lay aside these laws you may have thought unbend- 

 ing, and follow me a little through this great order the roseacea? — 

 the Rose family, or parts of it, untrammeled; a word more to help free 

 ourselves from notions we may have formed. Tn the Science of Bot- 

 any there is hardly an example, however strange and inconsistent 

 with the general laws of the science, but what we will find as an ex- 

 isting fact, if we search far enough. One solitary example will give 

 you plainly what I mean by this. It is this: VVe have all of us 

 believed, have we not, that a plant is incapable of maturing good 

 seed without the intervention of pollen, or the male element. Yet, 

 plants have done so in many instances. Again, we all know that it 

 is a very general law that a tree dies above that |)art when a section 

 of the bark several inches wide is entirely taken away all around its 

 trunk. Yet a tree has been known to live in that condition for 

 years. Therefore, please do not consider some of my observed facts 

 here given as imi)0ssible. 



