HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY OF NEW YORK. 



has been made by collectors abroad and even rarely by botanists at home, 

 and we have instances where orchids and other wild hybrids have been made 

 over again by fertilizing the parent species in our hothouses here at home. 

 Nevertheless there are thousands of wild hybrids lying obscured under Latin 

 specific names in our books and herbaria throughout Europe and America 

 to-day. As to garden hybrids, in the beginning of the past century it was 

 thought impious to molest nature, and the early botanists and students of 

 plant hybridism were pretty much in the position of the surgical vivisection- 

 ists who, rightly or wrongly, experiment on living animals to-day. In a 

 word, they worked in secret and scarcely wished or dared to tell the truth ! 

 It is curious to observe that while physical unions such as inarching or inocu- 

 lation, budding and grafting, were looked upon as quite respectable and 

 clever, the physiological unions by cross pollination were universally tabooed, 

 and in Northern Europe more especially. I say in Northern Europe, because 

 in South Europe, North Africa and the East, the necessity for fertilizing the 

 fig tree and the dioecious date palm artificially had been carried out from 

 very early times. 



In English gardens hybrids have been reared designedly for a period of 

 well night two hundred years. The first of garden hybrids recorded, in 

 England was Fairchild's Mule Pink, said to have been raised at Hoxton, 

 near London, before 1719, between Dianthus caryophyllus, and D. barbatus; 

 that is to say, between the Carnation and the Sweet William. This and 

 many other early hybrids were called "mules" from an erroneous belief that, 

 like the horse and ass hybrid so called, all vegetable hybrids were likewise 

 sterile. The early history of garden hybrids has been obscured by the secre- 

 tive character of the early experimenters and the jealousy they felt of each 

 other.* Also by a more or less superstitious fear of revealing or recording 

 what at the time was regarded as an irreligious or sacrilegious interference 

 with nature. There were also later on trade jealousies, and hybrids were 

 either said to have come from abroad, whence their parents had come before 

 them, or their origin was disguised and concealed under specific Latin names. 

 One remarkable instance of these latter tactics being adopted on a large 

 scale occurred when Messrs. Rollison, of Tooting, and other growers of 

 Cape heaths, at a time when they were nearly as popular as orchids and 

 begonias are to-day, reared numerous hybrids and seedlings all of which 

 were credited to the Cape of Good Hope and duly christened with Latin 

 names. 



Another potent source of error as to garden hybrids is due to the fact 

 that, fertilization having been effected by wind or insects, the seedlings that 

 varied were assumed to have been hybrids. In a word, the seeming inter- 

 mediates were assigned the most probable or obvious parentage without any 

 real proof. 



This brings me to the point of this paper, viz. : That the parentage of 

 an enormous quantity of hybrids depends on mere "guesses at truth" and 

 not on any accurate records whatever. It is difficult to estimate the dire 

 results of this practice as a source of error, because intermediates are often 



*See Gardeners' Chronicle, 1890, July 26, page 103. 



