British Primula Hybrids 295 
This hybrid sometimes produces single (scapeless) flowers like 
those of the Primrose—a fact I observed as long ago as 1880 1 . These 
single (hybrid) flowers must not be confused, however, with the 
very similar single flowers which are produced not uncommonly by 
the (pure-bred) Oxlip, but always very early in the flowering-season 
and on plants which, later in the season, produce also flowers in 
umbels, as usual 2 . These latter single flowers are certainly not of 
hybrid origin and are due solely to the suppression of the 
peduncle. 
I have observed that, in cases in which hybrid plants produce 
these single flowers, the tendency to produce them very early in the 
flowering-season is specially marked—owing, no doubt, to the 
influence of the Primrose strain in them; for the Primrose flowers 
very early. Thus, in the spring of 1898, I had in cultivation, in a 
cold greenhouse, a hybrid plant which had produced, the year 
before, both single and umbellate flowers. About the 20th February 
(the time when the Primrose might be expected to flower in such 
circumstances), it produced several single flowers. By the 9th April 
(about the time when the Oxlip might be expected to flower), it 
had produced two umbels of the usual hybrid type—one fully out: 
the other half out. In the following year (1899), the same plant (or, 
possibly, another; for I had several) began producing single flowers 
about the same time (say 20th February) and had produced altogether 
fifteen or twenty such by the 25th March; on which date, the umbels 
on the same plant were just beginning to grow. 
Our experiments made in order to demonstrate, in the field, the 
hybrid origin of this plant were as follows: 
Experiment I. As a first step, a number of Primrose plants (some 
long-styled, some short-styled), obtained by me from a wood near 
Chelmsford (which is about eleven miles from the nearest point on 
the margin of the easternmost of the two Oxlip “Districts” defined 
by me), were planted by Miss Saunders, in the presence of Dr 
Bateson, on 1st November 1898, in nine separate patches, in different 
parts of PeverelFs Wood, near Saffron-Walden, a wood in which 
Oxlips grow in immense abundance. The wood is at least two miles 
1 See Trans. Essex Field Club, 3 (1884), pp. 186-190. 
2 The occurrence of such single flowers on the Oxlip near Leipzig was long 
since recorded by Petermann {FI. Lipsiensis, p. 170: 1838). Their early 
appearance is, doubtless, evidence that ancestrally the Oxlip bore acaulescent 
flowers. 
