196 
THE FLORIST AND POMOLOGIST. 
them most of our old varieties; one of them has even yielded winter fruit 
similar to the Saint-Germain. 
It is not only in the fruit that the trees from the same variety have differed, 
but also in their various precocity, in habit, and in the shape of the leaves. 
These differences are striking when the trees are near each other in the same 
beds of the garden ; each tree has a different aspect. Some are thorny, some 
thornless; these have slender wood, those are thick and stubby; in some 
specimens of Poire d’Angleterre, the variation has proceeded so far as to produce 
the first year from seed, lobed leaves like those of Hawthorn, or Pyrus japonica. 
Nothing, indeed, -would have been easier than to make of these young trees 
almost as many new species, however slightly one might have adopted the 
ideas of the modern school, without knowing from whence they were derived. 
It is not possible to doubt that cultivation is a great source of variation in 
plants, and this from the complexity of the elements which it brings into play. 
The transformations -which they undergo in our gardens are rapid in comparison 
with what takes place in nature ; thus, for example, the Poppy, the Cornflower, 
and the. Larkspur always remain very uniform in a wild state, while in our 
flower-beds they are modified in the most remarkable degree. The flowers of 
the Poppy pass from a bright red to pure white, or even black, by the 
extension of the deep-coloured spot which exists at the base of each petal; at 
other times they are shaded with two colours; or, finally, they become 
extremely double instead of single as they were in the normal state. The 
flowers of the Cornflower, and those of the Larkspur, so uniformly blue in the 
fields, almost always change their colours after some years of cultivation ; they 
become white, rose-coloured, tinged with violet, or wholly violet; it is rare 
that they preserve their primitive tint. I may remark that we cannot attribute 
these variations to crossing with other species, since the flowers are fecundated 
by their own pollen some time before the expansion of the blossoms, and since 
these variations in the end become hereditary, like the specific characters. 
The inheritance of forms is not, then, the exclusive privilege of species; it 
belongs likewise to varieties, or to races whose origin is well knowm, and in 
consequence it is not an indisputable criterion by which to decide that any 
particular form allied to some other, found in a wild state and recognised as 
hereditary, is on this account a different species from this last. 
The theory of Van Mons is yer} T frequently at fault: witness an example 
taken from amongst a hundred others, and which naturally takes its place here. 
According to this pomologist, we may anticipate the quality of the fruit of a 
young seedling tree by the inspection of its wood. If the -wood resembles that 
of known good varieties, the fruit will be of good quality. The Chaumontel, 
Crassane, Archduke Charles, Easter Beurre, the Urbaniste, are universally 
esteemed as first-rate fruit; nevertheless the trees differ strangely from each 
other, some having long slender shoots, others thick and firm, &c. This 
little group of trees, which I take by chance, offers almost all the variations 
in size, habit, and wood which are known in the Pear-tree. I he experiments 
quoted above—experiments which show that from the same sowing we 
have thornless and thorny trees, straight and divaricate, smooth and downy, 
&e.—come even more closely to the point. There is no truth, then, in the 
assertion of Van Mons, when he says that the appearance of the wood of the 
Passe Colmar is reproduced in the Frederic de Wurtemburg, that the Saint- 
Germain has given its form to the Urbaniste, that the Ranee exactly resembles 
the Gracioli, and the Doyenne the Poire de Pentecote, &c. 
Everything is variable in the Pear tree, even the nature of the sap. The 
proof of this latter circumstance is found in the very different success of grafting 
according to the choice of stock. All races and varieties of Pear tree take on 
