Vegetable Hybrids and their Progeny. 11 



is constant amusement in the busy life of the city, while for 

 such as have tastes for historic antiquities, the neighbourhood 

 abounds in sites and objects of the highest interest. If 

 desert winds blow, or the climate generally be too relaxing, 

 the railway will in six hours carry the traveller back to 

 Alexandria, where the cooler sea breezes give the climate the 

 character of Greece or Southern Italy. 



Such, then, is a fair estimate of Nile travel. To the 

 invalid it is not the same as to the healthy ; the latter will expe- 

 rience no inconvenience where the former may find much. The 

 glorious old river and the solemn reliques of the great men of 

 old that line its banks, deserve all the enthusiastic greetings of 

 the students of antiquity, art, and history. Happy are the 

 days when, floating in the sunshine on its placid bosom, place 

 after place is reached, abounding in wondrous memories ; and 

 the homeward-bound traveller bids adieu to the sacred stream, 

 conscious that while life lasts he may call back unrivalled 

 remembrances of scenes, upon which Moses and the father of 

 history have also gazed, with greater wonder, when all that is 

 now ruined was in the glory of its pristine magnificence, under 

 the rule of the ancient Pharaohs, in ages which have long since 

 passed away. 



VEGETABLE HYBRIDS AND THEIR PROGENY. 



M. Ch. Naudin has recently communicated to the Prench Aca- 

 demy the results of fresh experiments on vegetable hybrids and 

 their descendants. He states that in 1862 he made numerous 

 crosses, all successful, between Datura lo3vis,ferox, Stramonium, 

 and guercifolia, four well characterized species, between which 

 no intermediaries were known. Datura lasvis and ferox, the 

 two species which differ most in the white series, being mutu- 

 ally fecundated, he reared in 1860 from seeds obtained 

 through this double crossing, sixty specimens of Datura loevi- 

 ferox, and seventy of D. feroci-laivis. " In this first genera- 

 tion, the whole collection of hybrid individuals having the same 

 origin, however numerous they might be, was as homogeneous 

 and as uniform as could be in a group of any invariable 

 species, or of a pure and sharply characterized race." 



" But these 130 hybrids presented a novel fact : they were 

 not only perfectly like each other, but they differed strangely 

 from the two species to which they owed their origin. There 

 was neither the form, the aspect, nor the fruits of the parent 

 species, nor was there anything intermediate between them. 



