HYBRID INTERMIXTURES. 
343 
offspring, were of different genera, and they will probably 
be never again disunited in any botanical work ; but the 
facts furnish much ground for the serious consideration of 
men of science. It happens (as if expressly designed to 
overthrow the theory, that the identity of species is proved 
by fertility or sterility in the mixed issue), that, while C. 
Capense, Zeylanicum, and scabrum, are very similar in 
their general appearance, and yield an offspring which has 
been found quite sterile except in the case of the two seeds 
above mentioned, C. Capense and pedunculatum are as 
unlike as perhaps any two species of any known genus; and 
if it were asserted that C. Capense and pedunculatum are one 
species, and C. Capense and scabrum two species, the as- 
sertion would appear, to any person looking at the plants, 
too preposterous to require a serious answer. 
In further confirmation of the fact that the sterility de- 
pends on constitutional discrepancy, or difference of what 
medical men call idiosyncrasy, may be adduced the curious 
plant figured in the Botanical Magazine under the name of 
Crinum submersum, which was found by my collector in a 
pond or flooded spot not far from Rio Janeiro, in company 
with a small variety of C. erubescens, and appeared to be 
exactly intermediate between that aquatic plant and C. sca- 
brum, which grows on high ground amongst the woods. It 
is absolutely sterile, the anthers being always shrivelled and 
the pollen dry, and it is not materially different from the 
mules raised in our stoves between C. scabrum and a larger 
variety of C. erubescens, the latter being of course a finer 
mule, but with exactly the same barrenness of the anthers. 
C. submersum is certainly a natural cross, in consequence of 
the pollen of C. scabrum having been brought to the lake 
by some humming-bird or insect which touched the stigma 
of the aquatic species. The same sterility has been found 
in C. amabile and C. angustum, which are undoubtedly 
mules accidentally produced between dry-land and swamp- 
species, the former probably between 0 . Zeylanicum and 
procerum, the latter between C. Zeylanicum and bracteatum ; 
as also C. longiflorum (Amaryllis longiflora of the Botanical 
Register), wdiicli is an accidental cross between C. Capense 
and erubescens, one variety of it having been produced at 
Demerara, the other in Jamaica. The fact being established 
with respect to one genus, that the species which have most 
botanical affinity and general likeness, if they delight in a 
