2 
nearly approaching to G. abbreviatus might be raised between 
G. tristis and Cunonius. 
“ Mr. Plant has frankly communicated all the information 
he can give concerning his monsters, and has sent three of 
his four roots to me. I have made a careful sketch of them, 
as above represented. He states, that in 1839 he carried 
from the greenhouse pollen of a plant, which by his descrip- 
tion is certainly a cross-bred Hippeastrum closely akin to 
H. Johnsoni, having dark red flowers striped with white, to 
a flower of Gladiolus blandus in a cold frame. The seeds 
produced were rather deficient in the usual foliaceous wing. 
Four roots were the produce. He states, that their leaves 
were less erect and more glossy than those of a Gladiolus. 
In the second season 1840-1 he was ill, and they suffered 
from neglect. They are now at rest after three years growth. 
The appearance is quite monstrous. There is scarcely a 
vestige of a regular conn, hut the base is irregularly formed 
and beset with yellowish fleshy substances having some affi- 
nity to the scales of a Lilium, and topped with the wrinkled 
remains of tubular sheaths which enveloped the base of the 
leaves. One of them, from the number of those tubular 
processes, seems to have formed offsets. To the eye, in their 
present state, they certainly exhibit no immediate hope of 
vegetation, but in due time they will probably do so. Mr. 
Plant says that they were raised in a mixture of sand and 
rotten manure. The question therefore arises, whether these 
• strange productions are diseased Gladioli, analogous to the 
monstrous turnips, like bunches of keys, which often occur 
in highly manured and hot sandy soil? or mules of such 
anomalous birth ? or roots of some plant unknown to me, 
accidentally confounded by Mr. Plant with his seedling Gla- 
dioli ? Hippeastrum, the asserted male parent, has one very 
extraordinary peculiarity, that its several species breed more 
willingly by the pollen of any hybrid of its own genus, how- 
ever complicated its origin, than by their own pollen. A 
bulb of H. Organense just imported from the Organ moun- 
tains having thrown up two two-flowered stems, one flower 
on each stem was touched with its own dust, and the other 
by that of a triple mule. When the flowers withered, the 
germen of each of the former swelled first, hut after a few 
days the latter began to swell also, and from that moment the 
growth of the former stopped, and they soon withered ; both 
