480 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



yellow xantheic pigment on the other side. These are the only instances 

 I know of green being a combined colour effect. 



I found in a flower of Lcelio-Cattlcya x Wamhamiensis that the 

 epidermal cells contained yellow chromoplastids, whilst some of the hypo- 

 dermal cells had crimson anthocyan. In this case, therefore, the yellow 

 overlay the red, and the result was that the sepals and petals were of a 

 bright orange-red. The parentage of this plant is not recorded. It would 

 be interesting to examine the parents. 



The description of colour effects in words is notoriously difficult and 

 unsatisfactory. The same name is commonly given by different persons 

 to colours of different hues ; we are not all equally gifted at distinguishing 

 and remembering hues, and it takes an expert correctly to name the colour 

 of a substance which to many of us appears black. Thus I remember show- 

 ing some Scarlet Kunner Beans which were blotched with what appeared 

 to me to be black, and which Mendel and other writers have always called 

 black, to an artist. He unhesitatingly said that the blotches were blue, and 

 in cutting sections I found that the epidermal cells, which had slightly 

 brown walls, contained dry blue anthocyan. The blotches were therefore 

 of a blue colour of such slight luminosity that all ordinary persons call 

 them black. 



Bentham says in the " British Flora " that the flowers of Atropa Bella- 

 donna are purplish-blue, while Bateson and Saunders call them brown. 

 Courchet examined these flowers and found that the pigments are a 

 purplish anthocyan in the epidermal cells, and in the same cells chromo- 

 plastids whose stroma is of a uniform yellow, but which contain red 

 granules. Certainly the combination is such as to produce a brown. 

 There is a partial albino variety of this species which has no anthocyan, 

 and is therefore of a yellow colour. 



I mention this difficulty of description because many will probably 

 disagree with me as to the names which should be given to some of the 

 hues I have spoken of in this paper. Any description, however, is better 

 than none, except perhaps calling the dorsal sepal of Cypripedium 

 Spicerianum a dull stone-white colour, which can have no meaning to a 

 person unacquainted with the flower. 



