SEX AND FEftTILIZATIOK. 107 



When the ovule of one plant is fertilized by the pollen 

 of another, the seed resulting therefrom should, as a 

 natural result, produce a plant intermediate between the 

 male and female parent, but it is seldom that both 

 parents possess equal potency in transmitting their own 

 individual characteristics to their offspring. For instance, 

 we might be successful in fertilizing the ovules of the 

 White my with pollen taken from one of the many j el- 

 low or red varieties in cultivation, and yet the plants 

 raised from the cross-bred seed may all resemble the 

 female parent more than the male. This alone would 

 not prove that the artificial fertilization had failed, but 

 merely shows that the influence of the male parent was less 

 potent in transmitting its characteristics to the offspring 

 than the female. A second generation of seedlings 

 from the cross-bred or hybrid plants may show more of 

 the characteristics of the staminate than the pistillate, 

 or the reverse of those of the first generation. It may 

 also be well to bear in mind that in experimenting with 

 wild plants, or those recently introduced into cultivation, 

 we have to contend with inherited characteristics acquired 

 by close interbreeding through an unknown number of 

 generations, and these have become so fixed in vegetable 

 structure that introduced disturbing causes have, at first, 

 but a slight influence in producing any very pronounced 

 change in form or structure of ofEspring. Still, as a rule 

 we expect the offspring of cross-fertilixed seed will show 

 the effect by varying more or less from the parent type, 

 and when once a species commences to vary, as a result 

 of artificial causes, it becomes quite diflBcult to determine 

 the limits. 



In all of our operations in transferring the pollen of 

 one plant to the stigma of another, we proceed in very 

 much the same way as in the cross-fertilization of the 

 Lily, only varying the operation to correspond with the 

 variation in the structure of th'd flowers of different kinds. 



