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HARDY FRUIT GARDEN. 



a very striking degree, although occasionally 

 deviations of greater or less importance occur — 

 sometimes, no doubt, naturally, and of late years 

 much oftener by design. The true cause of 

 such departures from legitimacy in nature, is, 

 we believe, enveloped in obscurity. Man has it, 

 however, in his power, under certain conditions, 

 to create varieties ad infinitum, by the process 

 of cross-breeding or hybridising — a process re- 

 quiring great nicety in the performance, and a 

 thorough knowledge of the physiological struc- 

 ture of plants. The old philosophers had some 

 slight idea of sexuality in plants, and Pliny some- 

 where says, "All trees and herbs are furnished 

 with both sexes ;" but nothing definite appears 

 to have been known until Sir Thos. Millington 

 and Nehemiah Grew, in or about 1676, clearly 

 established the fact. It is true, Malpighi, Caesal- 

 pinus, and others, laid claim to priority in the 

 discovery ; but, in alluding to this circumstance, 

 Dr Lindley remarks, " I see nothing so precise 

 in their works as we find in the declaration of 

 Grew, 'that the attire (meaning stamens) do 

 serve as the male for the generation of the 

 seed.' " It would also seem, from a very curious 

 passage in the Book of Deuteronomy, that the 

 Jewish lawgiver was well acquainted with the 

 phenomena of hybridisation, and with the dan- 

 ger of deterioration attendant on its being al- 

 lowed to proceed indiscriminately among culti- 

 vated esculents : " Thou shalt not sow thy vine- 

 yard with divers kinds of seeds ; lest the fruit 

 of thy seed which thou hast sown, and the fruit 

 of thy vineyard, be defiled." — Deut. xxii. 9. Ca- 

 merarius, so early as 1694, threw out some con- 

 jectures upon this subject. It was afterwards 

 taken up by Bradley, in 1717, who proved the 

 fact by producing hybrids artificially ; by Lin- 

 naeus, in 1744 ; and fully established by the ex- 

 periments of Koelreuter, and since by a host of 

 others. It is not a little strange that the great 

 founder of the sexual system should have 

 written a dissertation on the subject; and al- 

 though he endeavoured to establish a doctrine 

 which was true, the facts upon which he 

 grounded his doctrine, in the estimation of mo- 

 dern botanists, were false. He even went so far 

 as to allege that hybrid productions may occur 

 between species belonging to different genera, 

 and even to different families — a case, says the 

 systematic botanist, of which no example that can 

 at all be relied upon has ever yet been met with. 

 That natural hybrids do exist is not denied by 

 the most strenuous advocates of the purity of 

 the sexes in plants, but they say that they are few 

 in proportion to the number of vegetable species, 

 and none exist which are the certain production 

 of a union of species belonging to distinct 

 families. 



There are some who think otherwise, and 

 contend that, if man can by art produce hybrids 

 at will, by the connection between two species 

 of the same genus, why should not nature have 

 done the same over and over again since the 

 creation of the world, and that by the very in- 

 struments which are the grievous marplots of 

 every gardener who wishes to keep his favour- 

 ite variety of melon, or his select early cabbage, 

 pure and unadulterated ? None knows the dif- 



ficulty of preventing a species of adulterous in- 

 tercourse from taking place amongst certain 

 families of plants better than the enthusiastic 

 hybridiser ; for, with all his precautions, such 

 things will happen. The fact is admitted in the 

 case of.disecious plants, and conspicuously so in 

 the numerous so-called species of willows. The 

 doctrine held by some of the older botanists was 

 recently almost revived by the hints thrown out 

 by a learned gentleman at one of our scientific 

 meetings in Edinburgh, much to the alarm of 

 the younger, and perhaps more ardent than 

 prudent students in botanical science, that there 

 were originally only a few species formed, and 

 that the rest of the vegetable world had arisen 

 by hybridisation. The willow and the carex 

 have been sore stumblingblocks to botanists : 

 either of them may ask the first botanist that 

 comes his way, " Pray, sir, what is a species ?" 



" Plants agree," says the author of the " Sub- 

 urban Horticulturist," " with animals in the off- 

 spring when it is reared from seed bearing a 

 general resemblance to the parent ; but as in 

 every family the children of the same parent dif- 

 fer individually in features, temper, disposition, 

 &c, so among seedling plants, from the same seed- 

 pod no two plants will be found exactly alike, 

 and some will occasionally differ considerably 

 from all the rest. Nevertheless, it is an un- 

 doubted fact that all seedling plants not only 

 possess the character of the species from which 

 they have sprung, but even, in by far the greater 

 number of cases, some of the peculiarities of the 

 individual. The seeds of any kind of cultivated 

 apple, for example, will produce plants, the fruit 

 of all of which will more or less resemble that 

 of the parent, though, perhaps, some one or two 

 among a hundred may be considerably different. 

 Hence, by selecting from beds of seedling plants 

 those which are in any way remarkably different 

 from the rest, new varieties are procured ; and 

 till within the last half- century, when cross- 

 breeding began to be practised by gardeners, this 

 was the only way in which an improved variety 

 of any species of plant was procured. If the 

 seeds of varieties did not produce plants closely 

 resembling their parents, how could all the im- 

 proved varieties of culinary, agricultural, and 

 floricultural plants be perpetuated ? That the 

 same law which governs herbaceous plants holds 

 good in trees and shrubs cannot be doubted; and 

 if the seeds of a variegated tulip are more likely 

 to produce plants which shall have variegated 

 flowers than those of a tulip with only one col- 

 our, so, we should say, the berries of a variegated 

 holly are more likely to produce plants with 

 variegated leaves than those of a green-leaved 

 holly. If this law did not hold good in ligneous 

 as well as in herbaceous plants, how are we to 

 account for the different varieties of Hibiscus 

 syriacus coming true from seed ?" 



Advantages of hybridisation. — By this pro- 

 cess man is enabled to change the character 

 and quality of flowers, and of fruits. The 

 colours and symmetry of the former may be 

 changed, or made more perfect, and the size, 

 form, and flavour of the latter may be much 

 improved, by a judicious selection of the parents 

 called into action. Indeed, by this process man 



