116 AMERICAN CARNATION CULTURE. 



"Sports" are growing more common every year. They are 

 not freaks, but one of Nature's reserved methods for continuing 

 species when its existence is threatened. There is no more mys- 

 tery in new life by bud variation than from a seed; both are 

 riddles of the sphynx at which the world will ever wonder. 



The engraving of the American Flag carnation is a good il- 

 lustration of a "Sport." It was a bud variation of scarlet Portia. 

 It originated with Mr. Bergman of New Jersey, and was dissemi- 

 nated by the late Peter Henderson, in 1891. It was the most 

 evenly and distinctly marked red and white carnation ever on the 

 market. It also illustrates atavism, or suspended heredity, in its 

 parent Portia and that some of its ancestors were white and par- 

 tially renewed their features in the carnation American Flag. 



The muddy water of the Missouri river flows for miles un- 

 mingled with the crystal tide of the Mississippi; in the plasm of 

 Portia flowed unmixed sexual cells, each dowered with pigments of 

 red and white. At the axil of a leaf and at the birth of a bud 

 (which is only a modified birth of a new life) there happened a 

 rupture and mingling of the contents of bisexual cells and a new 

 life mixed and mingled with a birth of new bud. The color of 

 flowers and the life of a plant are things apart. The American 

 Flag and all variegated varieties of carnations show in the fission 

 of bisexual cells that there is not a fusion of parential colors. 



Different sex-cells are the legatees of diverse colors, yet they 

 ebb and flow in harmony in the plasmic current of a carnation's 

 life. The parent cells of the American Flag settled (out of court) 

 in the birth of a new bud on an equal division of petaline pigments. 



The engraving of American Flag was sent to the author by 

 the late Peter Henderson to illustrate a former edition of AMERI- 

 CAN CARNATION CULTURE, and is esteemed as a memento of the 

 friendship of a noble man. 



