ample, the Boston fern and its varieties, our fruit trees and berry 
bushes, and most of our house and bedding plants. You have 
no trouble in distinguishing your own house plants — your own 
pots of geraniums, aspidistras, crotons, and ferns from those of 
your neighbor. Detailed observations have taught us that even 
the leaves, flowers, and branches of the same plant, as well as the 
plant individuals themselves, are as unlike each other in many 
cases as are our friends. Examine the leaves of a mulberry 
tree, or those of a fern-leaved beech, and see for yourself the 
numerous forms they take on even the same branch. Compare a 
dozen radishes of the same variety pulled at random from your 
own garden, note their differences, and be convinced of the com- 
monness of intra-varietal variation. 
The navel oranges of the west all come from parts of the same 
tree, a tree discovered near Bahia, Brazil, the fore part of the 
last century. Yet every one knows that navel oranges are of 
numerous grades and kinds — as to form and coloring, sweetness 
and sourness, thickness of the rind, size, etc. Those grown in 
Florida (for they were once tried out there) were sweeter than the 
California product. In those from Arizona, the rind has at least 
doubledin thickness. What is true of the orange is true of the 
apple varieties. The Albemarle pippin from Virginia is a differ- 
ent apple in taste and flavor from those of the same variety 
grown in California. Western apples of almost any variety are 
deeper and more highly colored than those of the same variety 
from the eastern states, while the apples of this latter region are 
on the whole better flavored. In cool elevated regions, the shape 
of the fruit of most varieties changes to a flatter form than those 
of the same variety grown in plains regions. Even the much 
despised Ben Davis loses some of its pumpkin-like texture and 
potato-like taste when grown in the region where it originated. 
Cabbage grown in the tropics never heads. Varieties of water- 
melon resistant to certain diseases in Georgia appear to lose this 
characteristic when subjected to the same disease on the Pacific 
coast. The same thing is true of disease-resistant varieties of 
grain— the rust resistant wheats of Australia lost their immunity 
when grown in North Dakota. The flax growers of the northwest- 
ern states were threatened with the destruction of their crops by 
a disease called flax wilt, but fortunately some of the flax plants 
were immune to the disease and these were isolated and resistant 
varieties produced. Perhaps the most striking variations are 
those commonly styled “freaks”— such as pineapples with thirty 
crowns, two-headed turtles, five-legged lambs, apple trees natur- 
ally producing both red and yellow apples, tasciated plants from 
normal ancestors, — the common example of which is the garden 
cockscomb. In a park in Beecroft, Australia, there is an especi- 
ally striking example of fasciation in the Norfork Island Pine — the 
specimen resembling a giant cockscomb (Celosia) over twenty six 
feet high. 
Fasciation (flattened stem) is probably found in all species 
