70 INHERITANCE, c „ Ap ^ 



old, develop a latent tendency to acquire red feathers But 

 there are exceptions to the rule : hornless breeds of cattle 

 possess a latent capacity to reproduce horns, yet when crossed 

 with horned breeds they do not invariably produce offsprin 



bearing 



b 



We meet with analogous cases with plants. Striped flowers 

 though they can be propagated truly by seed, have a latent ten' 

 dency to become uniformly coloured, but when once crossed by 

 a uniformly coloured variety, they ever afterwards fail to pro- 

 duce striped seedlings. 22 Another case is in some respects more 

 curious : plants bearing peloric or regular flowers have so strops 

 a latent tendency to reproduce their normally irregular flowe: 

 that this often occurs by buds when a plant is transplanted into 

 poorer or richer soil. 23 Now I crossed the peloric snapdragon 

 (Antirrhinum majus), described in the last chapter, with pollen 

 of the common form ; and the latter, reciprocally, with peloric 

 pollen. I thus raised two great beds of seedlings, and not one 

 was peloric. Naudin 24 obtained the same result from crossing a 

 peloric Linaria with the common form. I carefully examined the 

 flowers of ninety plants of the crossed Antirrhinum in the two 

 beds, and their structure had not been in the least affected by the 

 cross, except that in a few instances the minute rudiment of the 

 fifth stamen, which is always present, was more fully or even 

 completely developed. It must not be supposed that this entire 

 obliteration of the peloric structure in the crossed plants can 

 be- accounted for by any incapacity of transmission ; for I raised 

 a large bed of plants from the peloric Antirrhinum, artificially 

 fertilised by its own pollen, and sixteen plants, which alone 

 survived the winter, were all as perfectly peloric as the parent- 

 ant. Here we have a good instance of the wide difference 

 between the inheritance of a character and the power of trans- 

 mitting it to crossed offspring. The crossed plants, which per- 

 fectly resembled the common snapdragon, were allowed to sow 

 themselves, and out of a hundred and twenty-seven seedlings, 

 eighty-eight proved to be common snapdragons, two were in an 

 intermediate condition between the peloric and normal state, 



22 Verlot, « Des Varietes,' 1865, p. 66. 



23 Moquin-Tandon, ' Teratologic' p. 191. 



24 ' Nouvelles Archives du Museum,' torn. i. p. 137. 



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