88 



ON HYBRIDIZATION AMONGST VEGETABLES. 



which the lower lip is abbreviated, on which account those were 

 erroneously formed into a separate genus Anisanthus by Sweet, 

 they are pretty uniform in the shape of the flower, with much 

 diversity of size, colour, foliage, stature, and even seed, which 

 last feature induced Sweet to build up another false genus Sphse- 

 rospora. Forty years ago I first crossed the large and brilliant 

 scarlet and white Gladiolus cardinalis with the smaller, but more 

 freely flowering, G. blandus, which sports with white, purple, 

 and rose coloured flowers, and (under the name of carneus, 

 which was in truth rather a local variety of the same) of a 

 coppery flesh-colour. The result was a fertile breed of great 

 beauty, of which the prevailing colour was purplish roseate. 

 Crossed again with cardinalis it yielded florid plants, scarlet, 

 copper-coloured, rose-coloured, white, and purple with endless 

 variation. By a cross of the first mule and of cardinalis itself 

 with G. tristis, of which the flower is pale yellow with brown 

 specks, deeper tints and rich speckling were introduced, with a 

 difference in the foliage and seeds, the seed of G. tristis being 

 smaller and longer, its leaves rigid and quadrangular, the trans- 

 verse section exhibiting a cross. The seeds of cardinalis are 

 like those of blandus, but larger. There can scarcely be two 

 species more dissimilar than cardinalis and tristis in any genus 

 which has the form of the perianth uniform, the latter having 

 such remarkable leaves, narrow, rigid, and erect, a slender stem, 

 with night-smelling flowers, and the former very broad semi- 

 recumbent glaucous foliage, and an inclined half-recumbent stem 

 with large scarlet and white blossom ; yet the produce of these 

 intermixed is fertile, and where the third species blandus has 

 been also admitted into the union, it is fertile in the extreme 

 (incomparably more so than the pure G. cardinalis), and by 

 that triple cross the tall strong Gladiolus oppositiflorus of Ma- 

 dagascar has also produced offspring, which, though not disposed 

 at present to make seed freely, has produced some this year. 

 Again, the first of these mules was fertilized by G. hirsutus 

 (known at the Cape by the name roseus), a plant with flowers 

 straighter than usual in the genus, and strongly scented, the 

 leaves hairy and margined with red. That cross has not as yet 

 proved fertile. The same G. hirsutus was crossed by Mr. Bid- 

 will at Sydney, where the Cape bulbs thrive more freely than 

 here, with G. alatus (which Ecklon wished to turn off into a 

 genus Hebea), having hard rigidly ribbed leaves, a short stem, 

 and orange flowers. The cross-bred plants flowered here last 

 autumn, being intermediate in foliage and flower. The only 

 opportunity I have had of crossing G. alatus with the first-named 

 mules was defeated, notwithstanding much precaution, through 

 the introduction of pollen by the humblebees, which are dan- 



