THE GLADIOLUS 9 



that it was by no means so strange as it would 

 appear. 



To be sure, nothing revolutionary came 

 directly from the reverend horticulturist's ex- 

 periments. He produced interesting new varie- 

 ties of flowers, but the theoretical bearings of 

 his work were doubtless quite ignored by his 

 fellow clergymen and, indeed, as I have already 

 suggested, were probably only vaguely realized 

 by himself. 



Yet as we look back on this work now, from 

 the new point of vantage that Darwin gave us, 

 we can see that the work of this amateur horti- 

 culturist must have had its share in disturbing 

 the ideas of at least some of the persons to whose 

 attention it came, and in preparing the way for 

 the new view of the flexibility of species that now 

 seems so much a matter of course that we can 

 hardly realize how revolutionary it seemed to 

 our forbears of two generations ago. 



A demonstration made with a plant that grows 

 in everybody's garden has force that comes home 

 to us more cogently than records of any num- 

 ber of observations of animals and plants of 

 tropical forests and South Sea archipelagoes. 

 And a number of new species of plants, gladioli 

 among others, that the Dean of Manchester cre- 

 ated by hybridizing old ones made their way into 



