46 INHERITANCE. Chap. XIV. 



produce striped seedlings. 22 Another case is in some respects 

 more curious : plants bearing peloric flowers have so strong 

 a latent tendency to reproduce their normally irregular 

 flowers, that this often occurs by buds when a plant is trans- 

 planted into poorer or richer soil. 23 Now I crossed the peloric 

 snapdragon (Antirrhinum majus), described in the last chapter, 

 with pollen of the common form ; and the latter, reciprocally, 

 with peloric pollen. I thus raised two great beds of seed- 

 lings, and not one was peloric. Naudin 24 obtained the same 

 result from crossing a peloric Linaria with the common form. 

 I carefully examined the flowers of ninety plants of the 

 crossed Antirrhinum in the two beds, and their structure had 

 not been in the least affected by the cross, except that in a 

 few instances the minute rudiment of the fifth stamen, which 

 is always present, was more fully or even completely de- 

 veloped. It must not be supposed that this entire obliteration 

 of the peloric structure in the crossed plants can be accounted 

 for by any incapacity of transmission ; for I raised a large 

 bed of plants from the peloric Antirrhinum, artificially fer- 

 tilised by its own pollen, and sixteen plants, which alone 

 survived the winter, were all as perfectly peloric as the 

 parent-plant. Here we have a good instance of the wide dif- 

 ference between the inheritance of a character and the power 

 of transmitting it to crossed offspring. The crossed plants, 

 which perfectly resembled the common snapdragon, were 

 allowed to sow themselves, and out of a hundred and twenty- 

 seven seedlings, eighty-eight proved to be common snap- 

 dragons, two were in an intermediate condition between the 

 peloric and normal state, and thirty-seven were perfectly 

 peloric, having reverted to the structure of their one grand- 

 parent. This case seems at first sight to offer an exception 

 to the rule just given, namely, that a character which is 

 present in one form and latent in the other is generally 

 transmitted with prepotent force when the two forms are 

 crossed. For in all the Scrophulariaceae, and especially in 

 the genera Antirrhinum and Linaria, there is, as was shown 



22 Verlot, 'Des Varietes,' 1865, p. 66. 



23 Moquin-Tandon, ' Teratologic,' p. 191. 



** • Nouvelles Archives du Museum,' torn. i. p. 137. 



