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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



supposed hybrid plant by putting together the two supposed 

 elements from which it was produced, and seeing whether we can 

 ourselves thus produce the intermediate kind. This may be 

 called, in scientific language, the synthetical method. There is 

 another method, the method of analysis, or of breaking up a 

 supposed cross-bred plant into its original elements, which may 

 sometimes give us clear and useful information. For example, 

 there are a certain number of creamy-white or sulphury-white 

 Daffodils, such as those which you will find in Mr. Barr's collec- 

 tion under the labels F. W. Burbidge, Exquisite, and J. B. M. 

 Camm, or those which my friend Mr. Wolley-Dod has some- 

 times shown as the " Bicester whites." Experts have thought 

 that these must be crosses between N. cernuus or one of the 

 pure white Daffodils and some yellow variety. Now, by sowing 

 seed of these kinds I have raised, from the very same pod, both 

 pure white and pure yellow flowers ; in fact the seedlings have, as 

 we say, reverted to the characters of their parents " on both sides 

 of the house," and demonstrated their origin beyond doubt. 



It is a curious fact, by the Way, that when two such diverse 

 elements as a trumpet Daffodil and a Pheasant-eye Narcissus 

 marry and produce a "nonpareil," or short-crowned offspring,, 

 that offspring never more produces from its seed its parents, but 

 only itself; while, on the other hand, the seedling from two 

 closely akin Ajax varieties will give in its turn seedlings which 

 reproduce both its parents. 



Following a somewhat similar analytical method, I have 

 sowed seed of the fine, well-formed, early Pheasant-eye, N. 

 poeticus omatus, and the result has been a great variety of 

 flowers, precisely such as appears in a large wild Swiss, Italian, 

 or Pyrenean bed of N. pocticus, among which I could find 

 scarcely one so good in shape or substance as omatus. The 

 deduction I make from this experiment is this — that long ago 

 some traveller or plant-collector observed in such a wild bed 

 a singularly handsome flower, and dug up and took to his 

 garden the bulb from which our whole stock of omatus has 

 descended. As to its early habit, the original plant may, as 

 sometimes happens, have been more precocious than its fellows, 

 or it may have been brought from some district where N.poeticus 

 blooms early. 



Thus both science and pleasure may find their satisfaction in 



