26 On the Production of Hybrid Vegetables. 



and Coburgia. The first flower had expanded before I had 

 taken out its anthers, and though I could not distinguish 

 any dust on its stigma, wishing to make my experiments 

 with certainty, I immediately cut the flower off so low, as 

 even to take off the summit of the germen, which I thought 

 I had destroyed, the embryo seeds being partially exposed. 

 The anthers were successively taken out of the twenty other 

 buds, to which various uncongenial dusts were applied in 

 vain ; and the only seeds produced were from the germen of 

 the flower which I had so cut off, and I raised true plants 

 of Pancratium litorale from them. This proves the fecun- 

 dation to have been speedily effected, unless the germen 

 could have been fertilized by dust having actually fallen 

 into it accidentally when I cut off the flower. I have been 

 unsuccessful in obtaining mule Convolvoluses, Hibiscuses^ 

 and Turneras, and I attribute this to some difficulty in 

 ascertaining the right moment for impregnating fugacious 

 flowers. I have opened the buds before expansion, to take 

 out their anthers, but the result has been a failure of seed. 

 I did raise one mule between the red American Convolvo- 

 lus sepium and Convolvolus candidans, but it was very 

 weakly, and died. 



Last summer I took the anthers out of two flowers of 

 Alstraemeria pelegrina and touched their stigmas with the 

 dust of a white seedling variety of the same species which 

 stood by it, and those two were the only flowers of either 

 of the plants which failed to produce seed. I can only 

 explain this circumstance, by supposing that the stigmas 

 when touched might not have been come to maturity, 

 and that the dust upon them might have become too dry 



