218 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



Let us suppose, then, that for several successive years the 

 whole produce of a plant and of its seedling offspring could be 

 brought to maturity, would the last generation from seed present 

 greater development in variety of form and colour, if the plants 

 had all been grown in cultivated ground, than would be the case 

 in a wild state in their native home ? 



Unfortunately, such an experiment cannot possibly be made. 

 In nature, whether a plant lives one, or ten, or twenty years, and 

 ripens yearly ten, or a hundred, or a thousand seeds, only one of 

 those seeds on an average reaches maturity, to replace every 

 plant that dies ; but in cultivation we may produce a flower from 

 every seed which ripens, so that the chances of variation are 

 indefinitely multiplied, and we must allow for this before we 

 conclude that it is cultivation which causes the varieties. 



Again, it is hardly possible to separate the effects of culti- 

 vation from that of selection and the spontaneous crossing of the 

 selected varieties ; if good forms continue to be selected, and 

 inferior forms excluded, the result is obvious, but this is an 

 accident of cultivation and not a necessary consequence. 



But if we notice what takes place in a garden where many 

 plants obtained from a wild source are grown together in culti- 

 vated ground, and their seedlings allowed to grow up, without 

 any selection or artificial crossing, we may obtain some clue to 

 the effects of cultivation alone. I am not going to enter upon 

 the subject of changes which may have occurred in long ages, 

 where the origin of a cultivated plant is almost lost in obscurity. 

 I confine my remarks to sudden and rapid development during 

 a few years ; and though the phenomena of one garden, on a soil 

 unfavourable to the improvement of flowers, observed during 

 only twenty years, must be very limited, I have thought they 

 may not be without interest in their bearing upon the question 

 I have raised. When I speak, as I propose to do, of the 

 difference between the plants which I have planted in my 

 garden, and the plants I find there a few years afterwards, it is 

 obvious that I must include the changes due to spontaneous 

 hybridising of different species and spontaneous crossing of 

 varieties of the same species. These changes are inseparable 

 from the cultivation of many plants together, and when closely 

 allied plants from different countries become neighbours it is 

 instructive to watch the results. 



