522 



The Journal of Heredity 



THE FIRST RECORDED CHIMERA 



The Bizarria, a citrus graft-hybrid which ap- 

 peared in Florence, Italy, about 1644. 

 Its origin was in a graft between a cit- 

 Hin and an orange, and the exact nature 

 of the freak was a matter of hot debate 

 between botanists, which ended only a 

 few years ago in the discoveries of Dr. 

 Erwin Baur and the experiments of Dr. 

 Hans Winkler. The fruit here shown 

 about natural size is part orange and 

 part citron. Photograph from the New 

 York Botanical Garden. (Fig. 1.) 



Italy, in the year 1644, where a gardener 

 asserted that he had created it by 

 uniting buds of several different trees. 

 There seems reason to believe that as a 

 fact "the first branch came from a callus 

 at the base of the dead scion of a graft 

 between the orange and the citron." 

 The tree was propagated asexually, by 

 budding or grafting, until it was spread 

 all over Europe; it bore fruits which 

 showed at various times the characters 

 of almost any species of Citrus: orange, 

 lemon, citron, lime. The leaves showed 

 a similar variability. So did the flowers. 

 The old botanists were astounded and 

 confounded. The Bizarria became one 

 of the stock topics of controversy, some 

 claiming it for a graft hybrid, while 

 others thought it could be nothing more 

 than an ordinary sex-hybrid; that is, a 

 hybrid produced by the common method 

 of cro.ss-pollination. But when fruits 

 were brought in which were com])ound- 



ed, to all appearance, of four or five 

 different species, or which were typical 

 lemons on the outside and typical 

 oranges inside, the acutest of the horti- 

 culturists had to content themselves 

 with guesswork. 



In 1825 another striking graft-hybrid 

 was brought to public notice in the 

 garden of M. Adam near Paris, where 

 two closely related leguminous plants 

 had been grafted together. The stock 

 was the common laburnum of gardens 

 {Lalnirniwi vidgare, J. Presl.), on which 

 was grafted a branch of Cyiisus pur- 

 piireiis Scop., a kind of Scotch Broom. 

 From this graft a branch arose that 

 was somewhat intermediate between 

 the two parents in character, and was 

 projmgated under the name of Cytisus 

 adami Poit. Its behavior was so freak- 

 ish that it not only brought poor Adam 

 notoriety, but came near costing him 

 his re]:)utation, some of the greatest 



