BOTAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



But, I ask, will this constant fertility after all possible crosses, 

 afford a proof of the difference of primitive types ? Precisely the 

 contrary conclusion is suggested; and when we have seen the 

 same fact produced in other species, at the same time well charac- 

 terized, and quite as polymorphous as the pear-tree, for example 

 in the potiron {Cucurbita maxima) , the pumpkin (0. Pepo), the 

 musk gourd (C. J?epo), the bottle gourd (Lagenaria vulgaris), and 

 the melon (Cucumis Melo), where likewise the strangest differ- 

 ences of form, size, colour, consistence, and taste are seen in the 

 fruit, one is forcibly led by analogy to admit in the pear-tree only 

 a single natural species. Besides, we may remark, in all specific 

 groups which are so polymorphous, it is the fruit which varies the 

 most, and also that in all these the fruit is inferior, that is to say, 

 formed by a receptacle in which the ovaries are immersed. The 

 adherence of the ovary should seem then to be the organographic 

 condition which has the greatest tendency to variability in the 

 fruit. What we know of Umbelliferee, Cupuliferse, and the genera 

 Medlar and Rose, in which equally the fruit is inferior, certainly 

 does not weaken this kind of view. 



Does grafting, as some maintain, modify the character of 

 varieties ? For my part I do not think so ; I have never at least 

 observed anything to confirm this opinion. Duhamel, for example, 

 remarked a century ago that the Imperial Oak-leaved Pear (a 

 curious variation of foliage which I might have indicated before) 

 had never more than three cells in the ovary instead of five. This 

 is the case still ; the fruit has only three cells, notwithstanding it 

 has been propagated by grafting only since the time of Duhamel. 

 Many other facts of the same nature might be brought forward 

 in support of the inability of the graft to modify the characters 

 of varieties, — those, for example, which the flavour of fruits, so re- 

 markably different from each other, affords. 



It is, then, an error against which it is well to protest, viz. the 

 belief that the degeneration of our races of fruit-trees in a conse- 

 quence of the constant practice of grafting for their propagation. 

 Not a single authentic fact can be adduced in its favour ; those 

 which have been alleged depend on entirely different causes, 



that this defect of seed depends, in the first of these varieties, on the more or less 

 complete abortion of the ovaries, and in the second on an absolute want of ovules. 

 — J. D. In Cucurbita moschata, the fruit of which, at least in the Courge pleine 

 de Naples, closely resembles the pear in many respects, there is sometimes a 

 total abortion of ovaries, and the fruit beneath the rind consists merely of a mass 

 of parenchymatous tissue. — Ed. 



