PEACOCK : COW-GRASS AND RYE-GRASS. 23 
of Hudson, spreads by underground stolons or suckers, Z: pratense 
perenne by overground stolons rooting at the nodes; so the latter 
must be a hybrid of the former! Verily, guesses are seldom 
scientific and rarely right. For the reader not versed in botanical 
terminology I will add a stolon is a shoot or sucker from the crown 
of the root just above or below the ground, extending almost 
horizontally along, above, or just under the surface, and developing 
roots and leaves, in time perfect plants, at certain points called 
nodes. When the connecting part dies, an independent new plant 
is the result. 1e Marsh Bent or Common Fiorin (Agrostis 
stolonifera \..) is a good instance of the above-ground stolon and the 
witch or Couch of the under-ground kind. While I was inquiring 
into all the clover questions about two years ago, Mr. Martin J. 
Sutton most obligingly sent me down dried specimens of all the 
clovers he grows, and after subjecting them to a most rigid analysis, 
I could not make out that there was a single sign of hybridity. 
I believe all the forms in the market, whether annual or perennial, 
are only cultivated varieties, produced by careful selection, from one 
or other natural variety of the Linnean type without any hybrid 
intermixture whatever. If none of the commercial forms are truly 
perennial we must look for the reason not in the plants but in the 
conditions of their life. By a well-known law of evolution, that of 
the correlation of parts and characters, nothing in a species can be 
altered by careful selection ieee changing some other part or 
character of the species whic ps it was not intended or 
desirable to change. Grasses dive clovers selected season after 
season with a view to growing very early and with a very heavy crop 
in their first and second seasons exhaust their vitality, foe their 
perennial character, and soon die out on permanent pasture, where 
they are eaten off and cannot sow themselves. The seeds of 
T. pratense and 7. repens as supplied by shops both demonstrate the 
application of this law; but still it is not a very difficult matter to 
get a perennial growth of both in permanent pastures on most soils. 
Before leaving the varieties of the common Red Clover, it may 
be as well to mention two others which are native in Britain. One 
is the parviflorum of Babington, so rare that we have never met 
with it in the field. It grows in dry places, and we suppose is 
a starved state rather than a true variety. It is a form with smaller 
flowers, stems arched ascending, calyx teeth as long as the tube, 
often exceeding the corolla, projecting in fruit, and so giving the 
heads a bristly aspect which does not belong to any of the other 
varieties. The last variety is the true ferenne of G. Sinclair, which 
must not be confounded with the so-called perenne, i.e. the sativum 
January 1897. 
