156 THE OLDER HYBRIDISTS 



that Mendel's law was afterwards discovered. This 

 very discovery might even have beefn made by Knight 

 himself, if he had only realized the importance of ascer- 

 taining on a large scale the numerical proportions in 

 which the different kinds of plants, arising in the 

 second generation from the crosses, made their appear- 

 ance. Unfortunately, this particular form of inquiry 

 never seems to have occurred to him. 



Knight's experiments were made with a different 

 object in view namely, that of discovering whether 

 a cross with a distinct race would provide the stimulus 

 necessary to restore its lost vigour to a strain of plants 

 which was supposed to have become debilitated, owing 

 to its members having been bred exclusively by self- 

 pollination for a long series of generations. 



The result of the experiments undoubtedly estab- 

 lished the fact that in some cases the hybrid offspring 

 of two distinct races shows a more vigorous habit of 

 growth than either of the parental types. The follow- 

 ing extract from Knight's own account will indicate 

 the nature of the experiments upon which his con- 

 clusions rest : 



* By introducing the farina of the largest and most 

 luxuriant kinds into the blossoms of the most diminu- 

 tive, and by reversing this process, I found that the 

 powers of the male and female, in their effects on the 

 offspring, are exactly equal. The vigour of the growth, 

 the size of the seeds produced, and the season of 

 maturity, were the same though the one was a very 

 early, the other a very late variety. I had in this 

 experiment a striking instance of the stimulative effects 



