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ERICA WILLMOREL 



sixty years ago. Licium, Digitalis, Nicotiana, Datura, and Lobelia, were the chief plants with 

 which he worked successfully, and as I have found nothing in his reports, to the best of my 

 recollection, opposed to my own general observations, it is unnecessary to state more concerning 

 his mules than the fact, that he was the father of such experiments. They do not seem to have 

 been at all followed up by others, or to have attracted the attention of cultivators or botanists 

 as they ought to have done ; and nothing else material on the subject has fallen under my 

 notice of earlier date than Mr. Knight's report of his crosses of fruit trees, and my own of 

 ornamental flowers, in the Transactions of the Horticultural Society of London. Those papers 

 attracted the public notice, and appear to have excited many persons both in this country and 

 abroad to similar experiments." Mr. Herbert, after a variety of curious and frequently repeated 

 experiments, has come to the conclusion, "that the genera of plants are the real natural 

 divisions ; that no plants which interbreed can belong to separate genera ; that any arrange- 

 ments which shall have parted such plants, must be revised ; that any discrimination between 

 species and permanent varieties of plants is artificial, capricious, and insignificant ; that the 

 question which is perpetually agitated, whether such a wild plant is a new species or a 

 variety of a known species, is waste of intellect on a point which is capable of no precise defi- 

 nition ; and that the only thing to be decided by the botanist in such cases is, whether the plant 

 is other than an accidental seedling, and whether there are features of sufficient dissimilarity to 

 warrant a belief that they will be reproduced, and to make the plant deserve, on that account, 

 to be distinguished among its fellows. The effect, therefore, of the system of crossing, as pur- 

 sued by the cultivator, instead of confusing the labours of the botanist, will be to force him to 

 study the truth, and take care that his arrangements and subdivisions are conformable to the 

 secret laws of nature ; and will only confound him when his views shall appear to have been 

 superficial and inaccurate ; while on the other hand, it will furnish him an irrefragable confir- 

 mation when they are based upon reality. To the cultivators of ornamental plants, the facility 

 of raising hybrid varieties affords an endless source of interest and amusement. He sees in the 

 several species of each genus that he possesses the. materials with which he must work, and he 

 considers in what manner he can blend them to the best advantage, looking to the several gifts 

 hi which each excels, whether of hardiness to endure our seasons, of brilliancy in its colours, 

 of delicacy in its markings, of fragrance, or stature, or profusion of blossom ; and he may 

 anticipate with tolerable accuracy the probable aspect of the intermediate plant which he is 

 permitted to create ; for that term may be figuratively applied to the introduction into the 

 world of a natural form which has probably never before existed in it. In constitution the 

 mixed offspring appears to partake of the habits of both parents ; that is to say, it will be less 

 hardy than the one of its parents which bears the greatest exposure, and not so delicate as the 

 other ; but if one of the parents be quite hardy, and the other not quite able to support our 

 winters, the probability is that the offspring will support them, though it may suffer from a 

 very unusual depression of the thermometer, or excess of moisture, which would not destroy its 

 hardier parent For the purpose of obtaining a large or a brilliant corolla, it will probably be 

 found, in the long run, best to use the pollen of the species which excels in those points, because 

 the corolla, in truth, belongs to the male portion of the flower, the anthers being usually either 

 borne upon it, or in some manner connected with it by a membrane." 



Fig. 1, vertical section of a corolla, showing' the included stamens and exserted 

 stigma ; 2, stamen with the awned appendages ; 3, germ, style, and stigma ; 4, 

 transverse section of seed-vessel. 



