XXV.] THE ILLINOIAN BERRY. 413 



supposed compound of this species and the Pine. 

 But if there was any hybridization in the early days, 

 I am confident that it was only incidental and its 

 effect was transitory. Our present strawberries are 

 apparently direct and legitimate progeny of the 

 Chilian species. 



3. Is the Pine strawberry derived from Fragaria 

 Virginiana var. IlUnoensis f I confess that I have 

 believed until recently that the garden strawberries 

 are offspring of our native berry ; certainly I have 

 always hoped that such would prove to be their 

 origin. It is with much reluctance that I give up a 

 pleasant and patriotic hypothesis ; but everything is 

 against it. I had long thought that the Pine straw- 

 berry of last century was only this robust form of 

 our native species, a feeling to which the early con- 

 jectures of an American origin for the Pine lent 

 color. But the Pine and the var. IlUnoensis are so 

 unlike in habit that they could not have been con- 

 founded. When the var. IlUnoensis was really intro- 

 duced into Europe in 1852 by Asa Gray, who secured 

 it from the ' ' wild and savage ' ' country in western 

 New York, it was thought to be so distinct from all 

 other strawberries that it was made a new species, 

 Fragaria Gray ana ^ although it is scarcely different, 

 except in greater size, from the common Fragaria 

 Virginiana. If this plant possessed such eminent and 

 variable qualities as to have made it the parent of 

 our garden varieties, it would certainly have given 

 indications of them somewhere in its wide and varied 

 range. As it is, it has only now and then come into 

 cultivation, when its behavior has been such that it 

 has soon been discarded, as in the well known in- 



