40 



ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



The flowers of the poppy pass from a bright red to pure white, or 

 even black, by the extension of the deep -coloured spot which exists 

 at the base of each petal ; at other times they are shaded with two 

 colours ; or, finally, they become extremely double instead of single 

 as they were in the normal state. The flowers of the cornflower, 

 and those of the larkspur, so uniformly blue in the fields, almost 

 always change their colours after some years of cultivation ; they 

 become white, rose-coloured, tinged with violet, or wholly violet ; 

 it is rare that they preserve their primitive tint. I may remark 

 that we cannot attribute these variations to crossing with other 

 species, since the flowers are fecundated by their own pollen some 

 time before the expansion of the blossoms, and since these varia- 

 tions in the end become hereditary, like the specific characters. 

 The inheritance of forms is not, then, the exclusive privilege of 

 species ; it belongs likewise to varieties, or to races whose origin 

 is well known, and in consequence it is not an indisputable 

 criterion by which to decide that any particular form allied to 

 some other, found in a wild state and recognized as hereditary, is 

 on this account a different species from this last. 



The theory of Yan Mons is very frequently at fault : witness 

 an example taken from amongst a hundred others, and which 

 naturally takes its place here. According to this pomologist, we 

 may anticipate the quality of the fruit of a young seedling tree by 

 the inspection of its wood. If the wood resembles that of known 

 good varieties, the fruit will be of good quality. The Chaumontel, 

 Crassane, Archduke Charles, Bergamotte de Pentecote, the Ur- 

 banist, are universally esteemed as first-rate fruit; nevertheless 

 the trees differ strangely from each other, some having long slender 

 shoots, others thick and firm, &c. This little group of trees, 

 which I take by chance, offers almost all the variations in size, 

 habit, and wood which are known in the pear-tree. The experi- 

 ments quoted above — experiments which show that from the same 

 sowing we have thornless and thorny trees, straight and divaricate, 

 smooth and downy, &c. — come even more closely to the point. 

 There is no truth, then, in the assertion of Yan Mons, when he 

 says that the appearance of the wood of the Passe-Colmar is re- 

 produced in the Frederic de Wurtemburg, that the Saint- Germain 

 has given its form to the Urbanist, that the Ranee exactly resembles 

 the Glracioli, and the Doyenne the Poire de Pentecote, &c. 



Everything is variable in the pear-tree, even the nature of the 

 sap. The proof of this latter circumstance is found in the very 

 different success of grafting according to the choice of stock. All 



