232 



The Journal of Heredity 



In the valley of the Nagold, in the 

 Black Forest region of Wurttemberg, 

 some 40 miles southwest of Stuttgart, 

 the capital, lies the village of Calw. 

 Here Koelreuter, whose home was in 

 Sulz, a little way to the south in the 

 Neckar valley, lived for a time, and 

 did some of his work on hybridization, 

 in the garden of a local physician. By 

 a curious coincidence, in the same village 

 of Calw in which Koelreuter had pre- 

 viously worked, and but 40 miles north 

 of Sulz, where also Koelreuter had 

 formerly obtained the first hybrid plant 

 ever produced in a scientific experiment, 

 lived and died Carl Friedrich von Gart- 

 ner, who for twenty-five years conducted 

 extensive experimental work in hybrid- 

 ization. He was a son of the distin- 

 guished botanist Joseph Gartner, Pro- 

 fessor at Tubingen and St. Petersburg, 

 and author of an authoritative work 

 on the seeds and fruits of plants, in 

 which figured the morphology of more 

 than a thousand species. The intro- 

 ductions to the volume for 1788 con- 

 tain, in the words of Sachs, "valuable 

 reflections on sexuality in plants." 



In 1830, two years after the appear- 

 ance of Wiegmann's memoir, the Dutch 

 Academy of Sciences at Haarlem, pro- 

 pounded the riddle of hybridization anew 

 in the following words: "What does 

 experience teach regarding the produc- 

 tion of new species and varieties, 

 through the artificial fertilization of 

 flowers of the one with the pollen of the 

 other, and what economic and orna- 

 mental plants can be produced and mul- 

 tiplied in this way?" No reply was re- 

 ceived by the end of the time for which 

 the prize was offered (January 1, 1833), 

 and the offer was accordingly renewed 

 for another three years (until januarv 1 , 

 1836). 



Genus 



Nicotiana (tobacco, etc.) 



Dianthus (Pink) 



Lychnis (Campion) 



Verbascum (Mullein) . . 



Lobelia 



Digitalis (Foxglove) 



Datura (Jimson weed, etc.) . . . 

 Oenothera (Evening Primrose) 

 Aquilcgia (Columbine) 



In October, 1835, Gartner learned of 

 the prize offer and was able to present a 

 brief resume of his work up to that 

 time, which, indeed, prompted a fur- 

 ther extension of time on the part of the 

 Academy. Gartner finally presented 

 the Academy with a memoir of two 

 hundred pages, and with herbarium 

 mounts of one hundred and fifty differ- 

 ent sorts of hybrid plants produced by 

 hand pollination. On May 20, 1837, 

 this memoir received the prize and was 

 later (April 20, 1849), published in re- 

 vised and extended form, together with 

 an extensive list of the experimental 

 material, and with the obtained results 

 arranged in tabulated form. 



An idea of the amount of labor 

 expended by Gartner during the twenty- 

 five years of his hybridization experi- 

 ments may be obtained by the state- 

 ment that he carried out nearly ten 

 thousand separate experiments in cross- 

 ing, among about seven hundred spe- 

 cies, belonging to eighty different gen- 

 era of plants, and obtained in all some 

 two hundred and fifty hybrid plants as 

 the total result. 



Among the prominent genera worked 

 with were Althaea, Avena, Campion, 

 Columbine, Currant, Datura (Jimson 

 weed, etc.). Fox-glove, Fuchsia, Gladi- 

 olus, Larkspur, Lobelia, Maize, Mallow, 

 Mullein, Nicotiana (Tobacco, etc.), 

 Oenothera (Evening Primrose), Pink, 

 Poppy, Primrose, Snapdragon, St. Johns- 

 wort, and Stocks. 



The following brief table, giving some 

 of the numerical data, in crosses in- 

 volving a few of the principal genera, 

 will afford a conception of Gartner's 

 labors; yet these constitute but one- 

 tenth of the total number of his crosses. 



107 



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