CHENOPODIUM ALBUM. 291 
Experiment First.—Seeds were taken from a single plant of candi- 
cans; one clearly and undeniably such, as Mr. Boswell-Syme concurred 
with me in regarding it to be, when picked among a number of other 
similar plants, growing in a field of very compact clayey ground, and 
which (I suppose, on good grounds) had been dry and hard when the 
plants were in the young stages of their growth. The seeds from this one 
plant were sown in the spring of the succeeding year, 1868, in a drill 
about two yards long and two inches wide; thus forming a stripe along 
the middle of a raised bed, originally made for mushrooms in the open 
air the preceding autumn, but failing to produce them, likely through 
being made too late in an ungenial season. The bed itself was a heap 
of horse-droppings, covered over with a layer of very loose earth, con-. 
sisting chiefly of rotted grass-turves. The seed was sown in a narrow 
line or drill, in order that the chance occurrence of any other seeds of 
a Chenopodium, in the earth used, might become apparent on the wide 
sloping space left on each side of the drill along the middle or crest of 
the bed. Three plants of C. urbicum came on the space so left, their 
presence easily accounted for; none of C. album in any of its forms. 
Along the drill seedling plants of C. album came up abundantly, 
and were left to struggle against each other for space whereon to grow. 
The summer of 1868 was hot and dry; and water was given three or 
four times about midsummer, when the lower leaves of the plants be- 
came yellow and flaccid from dryness of air and ground; otherwise, 
the plants were left to season and chance. About two hundred of 
them survived to the flowering stage; the most vigorous of these 
being three to four or even five feet high and copiously branched ; 
the smaller about one or two feet high, mostly unbranched, drawn up 
weakly under their taller and stronger brethren. If I had seen only 
the larger examples, without knowing their parentage, I should myself 
assuredly have labelled them paganum, as being in my own estimation 
certainly nearest to that variety, notwithstanding some slight mealy- 
whiteness on most of them, attributable perhaps to the dryness of the 
season. But some of the smaller examples, if equally seen apart, 
might have been as truly labelled candicans ; although even these WETO 
less mealy-white and less compact in inflorescence, than their parents 
and its associates had been. S o 
rom this sowing a score of specimens have been dried for distri- 
bution through the Exchange Club, in order to spread sus of 
U 
