ON EXTREME VARIATION 



that gave the world the wonderful new race of 

 white Watsonias. Quite possibly the white flower 

 that Mr. Arderne found among the colony of red- 

 dish pink ones may have been the only one of its 

 color among a million, or perhaps ten million, of 

 its fellows for miles around. But this single atyp- 

 ical individual chanced to be discovered, and its 

 progeny to-day are found by thousands, even by 

 hundreds of thousands, in the gardens and green- 

 houses, not alone of its native home in South 

 Africa, but of all parts of Europe and warmer 

 regions of America. 



I myself, as the reader will recall, have raised 

 these white Watsonias by hundreds of thousands. 

 Their strains were mingled in the germ plasm of 

 the quarter million bulbs of this species that I was 

 obliged to destroy in a single season. 



Such are the possibilities of multiplication of a 

 plant. Such is the geometrical ratio at which the 

 offspring of a single individual increase if given 

 encouragement. Boundless, then, are the possi- 

 bilities that lie before the plant developer who 

 discovers a single specimen of an aberrant type. 

 One white poppy among the million yellow ones 

 might be the progenitor of a race that would dis- 

 place entirely the whole race of yellow poppies. 



What I wish to illustrate at the moment, how- 

 ever, is not the possibilities of multiplication of 



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