on the authority of Darwin that a certain Dutch bulb-grower was 
repeatedly able to indentify 1200 varieties of hyacinths by observa- 
tions on the bulbs alone. There are said to be over 200,000 reliable 
species of plants and for the most part there is very little diffic- 
ulty in identifying them by certain character descriptions. But 
often these species are not so sharply differentiated as the descrip- 
tions in the manuals would lead one to infer, and individuals 
which one specialist might consider as species A would be class- 
ified by an equally eminent authority as species B. The story is 
told of a certain eminent botanist to whom was sent a plant for 
identification, that he identified it as species A the first year and 
on receiving specimens of the same plant the second year, he classi- 
fied it as species B, remarking in self-defense when the mistake 
was explained to him, that his conception of species A had 
changed in the interim. Such plants as the little shepherd’s purse 
and the brake-fern occur in the temperate zones of both hemispheres, 
and are easily identified. But some species are radically different 
in appearance under different conditions just as certain varieties 
of blue-flowered hydrangea become pink-flowered when grown in 
soil containing alum, and a certain variety of primrose with red 
flowers has only white flowers when the temperature in which it 
generally grows is lowered ten degrees. 
Variation is so much the rule among the characters of some 
plants that even the greatest specialists on classification find it 
practically impossible to classify them so that one of them will 
understand what the other is talking about. For example, the 
genus Rubus, to which our blackberries and raspberries belong, 
contains, so some authorities say, 1,500 species, while to others 
there are only about 200 groups. When the attempt is made to 
to call all the individuals springing from the seed of the same 
plant a species, variation steps in and causes trouble, because 
like does not produce like in the natural world in any but the 
most superficial sense. Hybridization is extremely common among 
all crossed-fertilized plants, and the characters of one species are 
shuffled and combined with those of another in the offspring, so 
that often a motley array of progeny is produced when seed is 
sown. Variation also arises through other agencies. But in 
nature, unless such new types are especially fortunate in their 
surroundings, they perish. The same species of wild plants that 
apparently breed so true in nature, when brought into cultivation 
under the watchful eye of the gardener in most cases become ex- 
tremely variable— perhaps because the gardener is on the watch 
and gives the new variation a chance. At any rate, wild species 
under cultivation generally break up into a large number of forms 
so strikingly different from each other as would merit specific 
rank had they been found wild. Take the sweet pea— the pur- 
plish-red flowered wild ancestral species is native to Sicily, and 
occasionally white-flowered sports are found wild. Thevarieties of 
sweet peas are legion now, and many would be accorded specific 
rank unhesitatingly were they found wild. The same is true 
of the petunia— which ancestrally traces its origin back to 
