VARIATIONS IN TRILLIUM AND WISTERIA. 413 
a similar observation this year in a Wisteria sinensis. Plants 
on my grounds have made an unusual second flowering. 
There were more blossoms in July than in April. Among 
them is a snow white variety, which has flowered annually 
for six years past at least. At this second flowering it took 
a notion to flower blue, — not quite as deep a blue as the 
regular tint of the well known kind ; but still anything but 
the white we have always had before. It was very difficult 
for my gardener to believe that in some way or another 
"some hybridization " had not been going on. Potatoes fre- 
quently change this way in the color of the tubers, when the 
intelligent farmer is sure " there must have been some mixing 
of the pollen which in some way affected the circulation 
and changed the color." Dahlias, chrysanthemums, balsams, 
and many other things with parti-colored flowers, frequently 
have some wholly of one of the mixed colors; but all this in 
| Some way is supposed to be the work of art. : 
These natural variations I regard with much interest as 
teaching us that the law of evolution is not wholly through 
seed, and that those botanists who look for it in the embry- 
ology of the reproductive organs are not wholly on the right 
track. 
Physiologists usually commence their treatises with “the 
seeds ;” as if the seed was the primary element in the organ- 
ization of vegetation, instead of the final result. Not that 
they really teach it, but this order of treating the subject 
gives the public mind that impression. Mr. Darwin’s ideas 
Seem to arise from some such reasoning as this. It seems 
hardly possible to conceive of first existences from eggs or 
seeds. True we see most of the changes through this 
medium now; but if we find cases in abundance (and I think 
we might if we looked for them) like these of Trillium and 
Wisteria, where changes occur independently of sexual in- 
fluence, they will at least suggest another law to account 
for the origin of species. 
AMER. NATURALIST, VOL. IV. 60 
