REJUVENESCENCE IN NATURE. 317 



doubted, since the French authors* unanimously assert 

 it, and this assertion finds strong support in the sterility 

 of C. Adami, observed by Henbn and Scringe, and con- 

 firmed by the behaviour of the specimens in the Carlsruhe 

 and Freiburg Gardens. C. Adami bears its name after 

 the nurseryman Adam, of Vitry, near Paris, who raised 

 it in the year 1826. The mother-plant is said to be 

 C. Laburnum, the father C. purpureus.^ In its arbo- 

 rescent growth and many-flowered racemes it far more 

 resembles the common Laburnum, than the low shrubby 

 C. purpureus with its two-flowered inflorescences hidden 

 between the leaves ; but the racemes are shorter and not 

 so full of flowers. The dirty red colour of the blossom, 

 the smoothness of the leaves, calyx, and germens, which 

 are villous in C. Laburnum, remind us more again of 

 C. purpureus. During the last ten or twelve years it 

 has been observed in most diverse places (thus in Lyons, 



Freunden der Natur in Wien,' i, p. 13, extracted in the 'Plora,' 1846, 

 p._623, and 1848, p. 26, in Hornscliuoh's essay on the 'sporting' of plants, 

 with which extract alone I am acquainted,) a shrub of Gytisus Laburnum, in 

 the Vienna Botanic Garden, which had previously always borne only the 

 yellow blossom proper to this species, suddenly produced, in the spring of 

 1846, on some of its hranches, the red flowers of C. Adami, and here and 

 there red and yellow flowers mingled in the same racemes ; nay, a twig per- 

 fectly representing C. purpureus is said to have sprung from a yellow-flowering 

 branch of this shrub. Hornschuch found, in the occurrence thus narrated by 

 Reissek, an analogue of the many other remarkable stories of transformation 

 which he reported from old and recent sources, (for example, the growth of 

 a LoKum, branch from a wheat stock, the occurrence of isolated oat spikelets 

 on wheat spikes, the transformation of oats into rye by a particular mode of 

 treatment, &o.,) and a striking proof of the possibility of conversion of one 

 species of plant into another. Without entering generally into the con- 

 tested question, the present case admits of a simple, and I think not very 

 liazardous explanation, in the assumption that an unknown hand had 

 engrafted scions of C. Adami in the said shrub of C. Laburnum, that at the 

 time of the observation there existed recurrences of the C. Adami to 

 C. Laburnum, and that the shoot of C. purpureus mentioned grew out of 

 such a graft, (certainly not out of a Laburnum branch.) 



* Henon (and Seringe,) 'Ann. des Sc. phys. et nat. de la Soe. d'Agricult. 

 de Lyon,' ii, 375, (1839.)— Buchinger, 'Flora,' 1842, i, 378.— Krschleger, 

 ' Institut.,' 1843, p. 372, and ' Bssai deTeratol. V6g.,' 71, (1845.)— Chevreul, 

 'Ann. des Sc. nat.,' 3 ser., vi, 186, (1846.) 



t Kirschleger, 1. c. 



