258 THE ORCHID REVIEW. [NoveMBER, 1916. 
particular quality of Cattleya Dowiana is very difficult to reproduce, as 
hybridists long ago discovered, and Mendelian research has not done 
anything to hasten the process. In fact, if there were any such short cut 
to success as is implied by the phrase, it would have been discovered by 
hybridists long ago, as they have practised recrossing to obtain any 
desired quality from time immemorial. 
An article entitled ‘Creating a yellow Cattleya on Mendelian 
principles” has, we believe, yet to be written, though a similar one in 
which the subject was not an Orchid reached us some time ago, but, being 
outside our particular sphere, we were unable to utilise it. It dealt, how- 
ever, with the subject of breeding generally, and rather suggested that 
breeders were working on wrong lines, and would be more successful if 
they conducted their experiments on Mendelian principles. But what 
these principles were, or at all events how to apply them practically, was 
not explained. Whatever Mendelism is or is not—and there have been 
many definitions—it provides no means of controlling the elements that it 
has to work with. If it were able to eliminate undesirable qualities there 
would be something hopeful about it, and even if it could foretell exactly what 
would happen in any given experiment the knowledge would be useful, and 
prevent many disappointments, but it can neither do the one nor the other. 
It tabulates the results of hybridisation, from which it assumes the existence 
of characters that are indestructible, and that can only be re-shuffled 
according to the law of chance, and it proclaims the existence of laws that 
it is unable to define. Mendelism, in short, is a species of symbolism, 
representing nothing more concrete than its own supposedly indestructible 
units, which can be subdivided and recombined according to circumstances, 
and which are as shifting as the sands on the sea-shore. 
If Mendelism could explain how a Cattleya like ©. Dowiana arose from 
an ancestral purple species of the labiata group, it might also tell us why 
the yellow colour is so difficult to perpetuate, but this it has not even 
attempted. And no believer in evolution can doubt that the species has so 
arisen, and that the peculiar character of its hybrids is due to reversion, the 
opportunity for which arises when it is hybridised with a purple species. 
But there is another result of this combination of purple with yellow that 
has already been noticed, namely, a tendency to produce whites, at all 
events in the sepals and petals, and this takes place both in nature and 
under cultivation. There are wild forms of C. Hardyana (Dowiana X 
Warscewiczii) with white sepals and petals, and when the latter are 
recrossed with C. Dowiana the yellow does not return, as was seen in the 
hybrid called Prince John, for which Messrs. Armstrong & Brown received 
