PRODUCTION OF NEW SPECIES 61 



already known to Shakespeare before 16 10, at any rate as 

 far as gillyflowers are concerned. Perdita, having been 

 told the cause of their streakiness, cared not to get slips of 

 them for her rustic garden : they had the reputation of 

 being ' nature's bastards ', and she was also aware that it 

 was possible to produce similar piedness by art (inocula- 

 tion). Polixenes tried to argue with her that as all arts 

 that add to nature are made by nature, the crossing of 

 different races is but natural after all, and that she should 

 therefore make her garden ' rich in gilliflowers '.^ 



In Shakespeare's day people were familiar with the idea 

 of two sexes among plants, although the function of pollen 

 was still unrecognized. But it was a remarkable prevision 

 of genius, which we can only describe as Shakespearean, to 

 explain the production of varieties among plants as the 

 result of cross-breeding, at a time when botanists knew 

 nothing about the function of the flower.^ The Art to 

 which Perdita refers must be the art of Inoculation, of 

 inserting the buds of one plant into or upon another.^ 

 And Shakespeare's alter ego, Bacon, reflects the same 

 thought. 'It is a Curiosity to make Flowers Double. . . . 

 Enquire also, whether Iiioculating of Flowers (as Stock 



^ Winter's Tale, iv. 3. 



"^ Dr. Church points out that at the time of which we are speaking, the idea 

 of crossing by grafting was accepted, and the methods of grafting fruit trees were 

 fully set forth in many books. As far as the ' Secretes ' of the ordering and 

 care of Gillyflowers are concerned, Th. Hill, Arte of Gardening, 1574, divulged 

 the following : ' you may make one stalke to bring forth floures of many colours, 

 if you take the seeds of every colour of the Gilifloure, and put them altogether 

 into a thinne small rede or Terdill of a sheepe or goate, or else tied up in 

 a thinne worne linnen cloth, setting the same in the earth well mixed with dung : 

 which after the watering will cause a plant to come uppe, bearing the like 

 number of colours in one stalke, as there were seedes sowen. 



And there be some which write, that if you myxe the Basill seedes with the 

 Gilifloure seedes, and use them (as above sayde) that they will spring togither 

 on one stalke '. 



It must also be remembered that Hill had many contemporaries, who, had 

 they been acquainted with the method of the production of new varieties by 

 hybridization, would not have imparted their secret to others, so long as they 

 thought that there might be money in it. 



^ Fleming's Virgil, Geoigics, ii. 21. 1589. 



