2 



nearly approaching to G. abbreviatus might be raised between 

 G. tristis and Cunonius. 



" Mr. Plant has frankly communicated all the information 

 he can give concerning his monsters, and has sent three of 

 his four roots to me. I have made a careful sketch of them, 

 as above represented. He states, that in 1839 he carried 

 from the greenhouse pollen of a plant, which by his descrip- 

 tion is certainly a cross-bred Hippeastrum closely akin to 

 H. Johnsoni, having dark red flowers striped with white, to 

 a flower of Gladiolus blandus in a cold frame. The seeds 

 produced were rather deficient in the usual foliaceous wing. 

 Four roots were the produce. He states, that their leaves 

 were less erect and more gflossv than those of a Gladiolus. 

 In the second season 1840-1 he was ill, and they suffered 

 from neglect. They are now at rest after three years growth. 

 The appearance is quite monstrous. There is scarcely a 

 vestige of a regular corni, but the base is irregularly formed 

 and beset with yellowish fleshy substances having some affi- 

 nity to the scales of a Lilium, and topped with the wrinkled 

 remains of tubular sheaths which enveloped the base of the 

 leaves. One of them, from the number of those tubular 

 processes, seems to have formed off'sets. To the eye, in their 

 present state, they certainly exhibit no immediate hope of 

 vegetation, but in due time they will probably do so. Mr. 

 Plant says that they were raised in a mixture of sand and 

 rotten manure. The question therefore arises, whether these 

 strange productions are diseased Gladioli, analogous to the 

 monstrous turnips, like bunches of keys, which often occur 

 in highly manured and hot sandy soil? or mules of such 

 anomalous birth ? or roots of some plant unknown to me, 

 accidentally confounded by Mr. Plant with his seedling Gla- 

 dioli ? Hippeastrum, the asserted male parent, has one very 

 extraordinary peculiarity, that its several species breed more 

 willingly by the pollen of any hybrid of its own genus, how- 

 ever complicated its origin, than by their own pollen. A 

 bulb of H. Organense just imported from the Organ moun- 

 tains having thrown up two two-flowered stems, one flower 

 on each stem was touched with its own dust, and the other 

 by that of a triple mule. When the flowers withered, the 

 germen of each of the former swelled first, but after a few 

 days the latter began to swell also, and from that moment the 

 growth of the former stopped, and they soon withered ; both 



