38 



ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCTET1'. 



tions, from which it follows that these trees do not spring, as is 

 commonly believed, from a single or even from a small number of 

 specific types which cultivation has caused to vary, but from as 

 many primitive types as there are discernible varieties # . Thus, to 

 confine ourselves to the pear-tree, of which nurserymen already 

 reckon more than five hundred varieties, we must admit at least 

 five hundred primitive species, and as these exist nowhere in a 

 wild state, logic induces M. Jordan to conclude that their domesti- 

 cation ascends to the antediluvian period of man, and that we only 

 possess them now because they were preserved in the ark which 

 saved Noah and his family f. Strictly speaking, the fact may be 

 conceived as possible ; but how many suppositions must we heap 

 up, one on the other, to render it probable! Is it not more simple 

 to explain this always-increasing multitude of congeneric varieties 

 by the principle of the variability of species, if this variability can 

 be demonstrated? But I believe that this has been done. The 

 Academy knows already the astonishing transformations which 

 have been observed recently at the Museum in the group of 

 gourds and melons, where the varieties are counted by hundreds ; 

 the facts which I have to describe in the pear-tree are of the same 

 order, and lead to perfectly similar conclusions, which are, on 

 one side the contemporary appearance of new races, on the other 

 their instability by crossing, and particularly the specific unity of 

 all the races and varieties of cultivated pears. 



In 1853 I sowed numerous seeds of pears, chosen the previous 

 years from four varieties, reckoned as very distinct by all nursery- 

 men, viz. the old, universally-known Poire d'Angleterre ; the 

 Poire Bosc, whose form is that of an elongated calabash, and the 

 skin uniformly cinnamon ; the Belle Alliance, short, and shaded 

 with yellow and red ; and the Poire Sauger, a wild, or almost wild 

 variety, so named because the leaves of the tree remind one, by 

 their white down, of the Common Sage. Por this last sowing I 

 employed all the crop of a tree which grows by itself on the road 

 from Marcoussis to Grue. The seeds of these pears sprouted the 

 same year in which they were sown, with the exception of those 

 of the Poire d'Angleterre, which did not do so till the following 

 year ; and this was the case in two different sowings in 1853 and 

 1854, without my being able to discover the cause. 



A small number only of these trees has begun to bear fruit, 

 which I regret, because the results which they would have yielded, 

 if all had borne fruit, would have been much more varied and, in 

 * Jordan, op. cit p. 32, &c. t Ibid. p. 89, &c. 



