546 THE STRAWBERRY, ETC. 



been assumed by Mr. Longworth and others throughout our country, 

 until they have become the recognized basis of all American strawberry 

 plantations. 



So indispensable is the sexual combination to the production of 

 abundant crops in all the American varieties, and in the Pine and 

 Hautbois varieties cultivated in Europe, that it may well be doubted 

 whether any person in England has yet realized what constitutes a full 

 crop of strawberries. Attention to sexual distinctions being indispen- 

 sable in a scientific view, it is equally demanded in every country and 

 climate where strawberries are grown that possess these characteristic 

 distinctions. 



There should be no confused application of the sexual terms stami- 

 nate and hermaphrodite, as the plants of these sexual divisions are 

 entirely distinct ; and while there are some species or families that 

 combine both of these traits, there are others that possess but one, to 

 the entire exclusion of the other ; and a lack of discrimination will 

 consequently produce confusion. Nor should the term "sterile" be 

 ever used in reference to staminates or pistillates, it being inapplicable 

 to either. 



It may here be cited as a singular fact, that of the eleven edible 

 species of the strawberry, there is but one which is positively known to 

 combine all the three variations of staminate, hermaphrodite, and pis- 

 tillate ; although European writers, and some of our own, have run into 

 the idea that the seeds of any one species would produce plants of all 

 the three sexual divisions, and some have even declared that there was 

 such confusion and vacillation in the sexuality, not only of seedlings, 

 but of the actually existing varieties, that no reliance could be based on 

 these distinctions as a reliable test for distinguishing species and 

 varieties. Such views, however, are adverse to the facts. No such 

 variations of character ever occur, but Nature sustains these normal 

 distinctions as permanent and eternal, the vacillations finding existence 

 only in the brains of such theorists. 



Although it is a truism that the differences between the humid and 

 cool climate of England and our dry and hot atmosphere cause the best 

 educated English gardeners who migrate here to commit great absurdi- 

 ties, yet these climatic variations have no more connexion with the 

 sexuality of strawberries, nor with the results of that sexuality in the 

 productiveness of the crop, than they would have on two crops grown 

 side by side — the one on dry soil, and the other subjected to irrigation. 

 Sexuality is Nature's owx fact ; the success and extent of the 

 crop are the result of ait and culture. The incontrovertible truth thus 

 stands forth that the exercise of science in regard to the existing 

 sexuality is not necessarily variable by climate but is quite as im- 

 portant in one country as in another. 



The chimerical idea of a transmutation of sexes by any variations 

 of climate or circumstances is antagonistic to that order of Nature 



