386 The Transformation of Plants. 



Lindley deduces from these experiments, and which are of 

 great importance to all amateur and practical cultivators who 

 have any desire to improve our flowers, fruits and vegetables. 

 No one would recognize in the rich Baldwin apple the 

 sour and worthless crab, or in the delicious Seckel pear the 

 austere wilding, which grows in our hedge-rows. These 

 changes are scarcely greater than that of the jEgilops trans- 

 formed into wheat through twelve succeeding generations. 

 Our vegetables have undergone nearly the same alteration ; 

 few persons would suppose the rich Champion of England 

 pea was the off"spring of the small kind known as the field 

 pea, or sweet corn the result of cultivation upon the wild 

 grain of South America. This we all have seen accom- 

 plished ; and though the experiments of M. Fabre are not as 

 familiar, they appear sufficiently well authenticated to be 

 taken as facts ; and such being the case, how can we longer 

 doubt that the transmutations heretofore brought to notice 

 are not strictly true ? — 



In 1844, the question of the transmutation of corn was 

 raised in this Journal, at p. 555 of the volume for that year, 

 and at p. 779 it was further alluded to. Thereupon ensued 

 many communications on both sides the question, and from 

 time to time the subject has been occasionally revived ; but 

 it must be owned that it nevertheless remains just where it 

 was, so far as anything like proof is concerned. Belief has 

 opposed itself to unbelief, credulity to incredulity, and asser- 

 tion to counterassertion ; but of evidence derived from well- 

 conducted experiments, we have had nothing. For ourselves, 

 without by any means encouraging the belief in the change 

 of oats into rye, or in any similar transmutations, we have 

 also asserted, from the first, that no naturalist, acquainted 

 with certain facts which have become known of late years, 

 could venture absolutely to deny the possibility of such 

 changes. Writing in 1844, we said that " in Orchidaceous 

 plants, forms just as different as wheat, barley, rye, and oats, 

 have been proved by the most rigorous evidence to be acci- 

 dental variations of one common form, brought about no one 



