20 AMERICAN CARNATION CULTURE. 



and spurred. The boundary between Atim and its successors and 

 Atim and its parents was vague and ill-defined. It required time 

 and heredity to round its successors into a species. Varieties 

 are the parents of species. Nature starts a variety at a single 

 fructification, but it requires generations of plant life to fix the 

 features of the variety into a distinct class. It has taken years to 

 eliminate ancestral vestiges from carnations, and unfold their 

 higher possibilities; and the end is not yet. Racial heredity is so 

 insistent that as late in the carnation's history as the first edition 

 of American Carnation Culture the author found it necessary 

 to classify it into late and early, constant and cropping, short 

 and long stemmed classes, which divisions were founded on the 

 retained relics of their pre-natal types. 



The species of carnation evolved by the labors of Dalmais, 

 Schmitt and Alegatiere had three important features of difference 

 from all its progenitors. 



First. It was structural, had stiffer lower stems, and its an- 

 cestors had a sprawling and procumbent habit. 



Second. It kindly responded to the stimulus of artificial heat 

 called forcing, which is death to its parental and all its generic 

 relations. 



Third. It possesses inherently the power of distributing the 

 short-lived and immense single crop of bloom peculiar to its tribe 

 of plants throughout its entire mature life. By reason of these 

 three distinguishing peculiarities it has been called the perpet- 

 ual carnation. 



It has been called the tree carnation, because its stems are 

 longer, more erect, rigid and tree-like than any of its associate 

 species. It is called the re77to7itant carnation from its nature to 

 continually re mount itself with flowers. It is called the sempe?- 

 T^i^r^w^ carnation from semper, (continuously) 2ind /io)ens (flower,) 

 meaning continuously flowering. It has been called the clove 

 carnation because of the clove fragrance of its flower. 



I have made diligent effort to obtain facts relating to the in- 

 troduction of carnations into America, and the result leaves little 

 that is legecdary. A firm of florists on I^ong Island, composed 



