HYACINTH CULTURE AT HAARLEM 147 



Hon (when their seed has been crossed by insects) is an 

 accident. 1 



Curious experiments have been made with hyacinths. 



Two different bulbs are to be chosen, blue and white, for 

 instance. Cut them perpendicularly down nearly through 

 the middle, but being careful to avoid cutting into their 

 central shoots (i.e. the future flower-stalk), then join together 

 the two larger halves containing the flower -shoot, thus 

 making one bulb of them, so that the two flowers should 

 appear as arising from one bulb. Then, with a little moss 

 wound round the closed joins, the made-up bulb may be 

 put into the earth like any other. This usually results in 

 producing two stems stuck together back to back, with one 

 skin around them both apparently ; and on one side comes 

 out white flowers, on the other red or blue. Sometimes the 

 colours get mixed, the colour of one flower shaded with that 

 of the other, very rarely do the stems grow separate. 



None of these experiments seem to explain how it is that 

 a single hyacinth can produce a double (by seed raising), 

 though perhaps in ten thousand seeds only two or three will 

 come up double flowered ; nor how it is that the double can 

 be redoubled (through seed), and that once redoubled, the 

 bulb is constant in giving off young bulbs with double flowers, 

 which never again degenerate into single ; nor will a single, 

 in its offshoots, ever become a double hyacinth. 



1 One feels disinclined to believe Saint-Simon is quite accurate in his 

 theory, that the variations in kind and colour of hyacinths raised by 

 seed are entirely due to the interference of insects, for in the case of 

 bees, it has .been observed by certain men of science that bees invariably 

 prefer to visit flowers, not-only of one kind but of one colour during the 

 course of one journey. That thus a bee, beginning on a certain white 

 flower, will choose out these white flowers, leaving out every coloured 

 one of that or of another species, until, laden with honey, it returns to 

 the hive. (It may be, bees lose their heads when it is a question of 

 hyacinths.) 



