159 
PASSION FLOWEKS. 
By maxwell T. MASTERS, M.D., F.L.S. 
[PLATE XLIV.]] 
HEKE are some plants which arrest at once the attention,. 
not only of the curious, but even of the casual observer. 
Passion flowers afford a good illustration of this statement. Their 
elegant climbing habit, their slender tendrils, their striking 
foliage, their flowers, as singular in their structure as they are 
beautiful in their appearance, to say nothing of the legends 
attaching to them, amply account for the interest felt in these 
plants, alike by the scientific botanist and the dilettante. This 
interest has been heightened of late by the singular facts that 
have been brought to light by those who have been making ex- 
periments on the subject of cross-fertilization or hybridization. 
Time was when the botanists, with some few exceptions, looked 
rather contemptuously than otherwise on cross-breeds and such- 
! like mongrels, and deemed them unworthy the attention of la 
haute science. And, even now-a-days, there are some surveyors 
who look askance at garden hybrids,” however beautiful, be- 
cause the said hybrids do most undoubtedly destroy and oblite- 
j rate, to a very great extent, the landmarks erected, at no little 
j cost of time and labour, by the surveyors aforesaid. Neverthe^ 
! less, in a gardener’s point of view, the result is in general so 
I satisfactory, that what he calls an improved “ strain ” is produced, 
j while, physiologically, the gain is so great as to compensate, in 
1 no little degree, for the technical confusion that arises from 
the operations of the hybridizer. 
The general reader will find in Mr. Darwin’s ^‘Variation 
of Animals and Plants,” vol. ii. p. 137, a general summary of 
I the results obtained by experimenters in this beautiful genus, so 
I that it is unnecessary to go into details here. The most striking 
I fact elicited is, that many of the so-called species refuse, either 
j entirely or partially, to be fertilized with pollen of their own 
I kind, while, almost without exception, they set freely, not only 
I when pollen from another individual of the same species is 
applied to their stigmas, but quite as freely, or even more so, 
VOL. VIII. — XO. XXXI. M 
