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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



which he has set his mind, and his motto is Labor omnia 

 vincit. 



Discussion. 



Dr. Masters, F.R.S., drew attention to the coincidence that 

 at the very time when Mr. Douglas was reading his paper a 

 statue was being unveiled at Shrewsbury to the memory of 

 Charles Darwin, and reminded the meeting of the great value 

 and importance of the experiments and investigations with regard 

 to the fertilisations of plants which Mr. Darwin had made. 

 Darwin, he said, had been one of the first to point out the 

 significance attending the slightest variations observed in plants, 

 and he placed great emphasis on the fact that they were none of 

 them the outcome of mere whim or caprice, but afforded evidence 

 of the greatest possible value to students inquiring into the laws 

 of design, environment, &c, as they affected plant life. 



Mr. A. Dean advised using seedlings from Germania as pollen 

 parents in crossing Germania, as he fancied that a better Ger- 

 mania could only be obtained by either self-fertilisation or by 

 crossing with its own produce, or possibly with some other good 

 yellow. 



Mr. Colville Beown stated that he had raised a great many 

 seedling carnations from Italian seed, which all produced single 

 flowers the first season of flowering, but that many of these 

 became semi-double the next season, and quite double the next. 



Mr. Jenkins, referring to the supposed prepotency of the 

 pollen parent, said that he had crossed two of the best white 

 flowers, and the seed so obtained produced flowers of almost all 

 colours, even some scarlets among them. 



Mr. Douglas, replying, mentioned that "Purple Emperor" 

 was obtained from two white wire-edged picotees which had 

 been crossed with a view of getting white ground picotees. Ho 

 also said that for a single-flowering carnation to develop into a 

 double one, was quite the vice versa of his experience. 



