98 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



among his seedlings. He will have many blanks and few prizes. 

 Probably not one seedling out of a hundred, or out of many 

 hundreds, will bear comparison with the finer flowers now in 

 our gardens. It is probable that seed of Horsfieldi — a magni- 

 ficent flower, which seeds freely — has been sown by many with 

 sanguine hopes of flowers as big as dinner plates. Out of many 

 seedlings from Horsfieldi now flowering with me, not one has 

 the smallest pretensions to equal its parent, or even to resemble 

 it, and Mr. Wolley Dod tells me the same thing is true of a 

 great bed of the same seedlings in his garden. The extraordinary 

 variety, however, of form and colour among such seedlings leads 

 me to suppose that the Horsfieldi flowers were for the most 

 part impregnated with pollen from other Ajax varieties. It is 

 alleged that the Narcissus is usually " proterandrous," i.e., 

 ripens and sheds its pollen before the stigma is receptive, and 

 therefore we should perhaps do as Darwin did in his experiments 

 — cover with a gauze net those flowers which we desire to pro- 

 duce " true " offspring — excluding insects, and applying pollen 

 from flowers of their own race, if obtainable. But Mr. Back- 

 house observed long ago that seedlings of Empress and Emperor 

 have a tendency to revert to an inferior type. (With regard to 

 Emperor, I find the seedlings fairly constant, as may be seen 

 from two flowers here at hand.) With me, the progeny of 

 Vicar of Lul worth, a remarkably shapely and handsome 

 little flower, had reverted to pure common wild Pseudo-N., and 

 the same reversion has taken place in seedlings of the so-called 

 " Bicester Whites," which are almost certainly crosses between 

 some white Daffodil and the indigenous " Lent-lily." On the 

 other hand, I have myself, to some extent, imitated both the 

 Lulworth and the Bicester flowers by crossing the Lent-lily with 

 garden Daffodils. The Lent-lily, dusted with pollen of a 

 trumpet -Daffodil " Achilles," has given me the flowers, here 

 shown, with prettily expanded crowns. Some ten years ago 

 there came from Holland certain large yellow trumpet Daffodils, 

 now known as "Henry Irving," "Golden Spur," "General 

 Gordon," and others. They were supposed to be Dutch seed- 

 lings, from what is known as Narcissus spurius. Here are 

 seedlings, from my garden, raised from N. spurius, and it will 

 be seen that they are on the way to represent these or similar 

 forms, and that their variation is considerable and noteworthy. 



