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MEMORIALS OF RAY : 



flowers ; anemonies, lark-spurs, columbines, bears-ears, 

 stocks, and wall-flowers, primroses and cowslips, crocuses, 

 blewbottles, daisies, hepaticas, violets. And this is the 

 usual, if not the only way, of getting double flowers of 

 all sorts. Most red and purple flowers, and some yellow 

 ones too, by sowing themselves in a garden, will give 

 you some of white and different colours, as I found by 

 my own experience in many, v. g. Valeriana rubra^ Bod., 

 mothmuUein, blewbottle, prinu-ose, goats-rue, &c. Nay, 

 in the fields we find scarce any red, purple, or blew- 

 flowered plant, but one way or other it will vary, and 

 come with a white or differently coloured flower. Plants 

 that bear a yellow flower seldom vary in the fields. 

 Secondly, the other way to diversify plants is by frequent 

 removals. So Sir Hugh Piatt tells us we may advance 

 plants from single to be double-flowered, which seems 

 probable ; because plants, by long standing in one place, 

 will by degrees degenerate, and become of double single- 

 flowered, or turn from rare to common colours. But 

 because my trials of this kind succeeded not to produce 

 such an effect, and I never yet met with any intelligent 

 and credible person who could attest it upon his own ex- 

 perience, I shall leave it to a farther examination. 



But to return to our subject. That these varieties of 

 plants we have been discoursing of are not to be 

 accounted distinct species, but only accidental differences, 

 may be farther confirmed, both because that if they stand 

 long in the same place without culture, they wiU (as we 

 hinted before) degenerate, losing the beauty of their 

 colours, and of double becoming single ; and also because 

 that by the seed they will not propagate their species, 

 but give you single plants, and of the common colour ; I 

 mean if they be sown in their proper natural place and 

 soil. The only sure way to propagate them being by 

 offsets from the root, if they be bulbous plants ; or by 

 slips and branches, if others. To this I might add, that 

 from the same stem of a stock July flower I have some- 



