254 
TEE COTTAGE GARDENER AND COUNTRY GENTLEMAN, July 24, 1860. 
that they should sign the “ document ” of their masters, 
the cross-breeders, until they can perceive the relation 
between facts on the one hand and fables on the other. 
No need to tell of masons, and plasterers, and “them” 
sort of people, till we ourselves can appreciate and show 
the value of practice and manipulation in conjunction 
with the branch of science which places the results on a 
natural basis. 
The Prince Consort, in his presidential charge to the 
Statistical Congress the other day, said that the first and 
fundamental effort of every branch of science should be 
to adopt a uniform explanation of the terms it made use 
of: therefore, on that assumption, our branch is still on 
strike about the “document,”-—about the definitions 
which the cross-breeders draw from the bosom of Nature, 
as it were. The labours of the cross-breeder compel the 
botanist to reconsider his arrangements, and to build 
them on a natural basis, like his own experiments. It 
was feared at first that the labours of the former would 
rather confound than assist the efforts of science; but 
experience did not affirm the point. The whole weight of 
science goes to prove the first and firmest rule of the cross¬ 
breeder— that" plants from two natural genera cannot 
be crossed. In all other points science and practice are 
at variance as to the ways and means for crossing, and to 
the definition of many of the terms which are necessarily 
employed to convey the meaning of our dealings of 
crossed aud crossing flowers. 
“ The pollen is never shed from the anther of the 
stamen until the stigma of the pistil is fully developed 
to receive it,” is the first rule given by science to the 
student in cross-breeding. Nature tells him a very 
different tale, as much as to say, “ In order to keep down 
mental pride. I have so arranged that the presence or 
absence of stamens and pollen, and the progress of the 
growth and ripening of pollen have no effects whatever 
on the development of the pistils and stigma. I produce 
and ripen the pollen, and effect my process of fertilisation 
while the flower is yet in the first stages of a flower-bud ■* 
and I work on gradually from that point, keeping the 
relative development of anthers and stigmas as much 
apart as if each of them were a member of a different 
plant, and as if my intention were never to allow a stigma 
to be fertilised by the pollen of the same flower. It is 
by ripening and dispersing the pollen of some particular 
plants before the stigma of any particular flower of them 
is ripe enough for effecting self-fecundation, that I am 
enabled to keep them from degenerating; and not only 
so, but that is my mode of improving races as much as of 
keeping them in their generations free from that degree 
of debility which would render them an easy prey to 
more powerful and competitive neighbours. In your 
kingdom among animated nature, I have given sight and 
smell as means to the same end.” 
That is how Nature speaks to Science on the very first 
lesson on cross-breeding. Therefore, he who goes to cross 
on scientific data, will soon find he is at cross purposes 
with Nature. 
The gaping of the stigma when the pollen is about to 
fall, and at that time only, may be observed in the 
Heartsease. This view of crossing is taking it in the 
easy mood, but in the wrong tense. Stigmas which are 
so formed as to resemble gaping in any stage gape at all 
stages, from the nascent flower-bud to the time of natural 
maturity for the reception of pollen; and some gape on 
from the nascent to the point of puberty. Split flower- 
buds of the Leschenaultias and you will find the stigma 
with a gaping mouth wide as that of a young cuckoo, 
and open day and night till the anthers discharge their 
dust in it in secret. When that is effected the mouth 
closes; and by the time tho flower opens all traces of 
stamens, anthers, and pollen are gone. Thousands this 
week or month can prove what I say. 
In the great majority of such instances as are likely 
* Lcsclienaxiltias and Wheat are so fertilised. 
to come before the amateur, the age of puberty in the 
stigma is a mystery and a guess, there being no sign 
to indicate it perceivable by auy ordinary lens. In the 
Rhododendron and Lily, and kinds with kindred styles 
and stigmas, the auspicious moment is known by a viscid 
fluid on the surface, and that fluid remains as long as the 
member is capable of fertilisation and no longer. The 
instance of the fluid drying up at noon, and reappearing 
each morning on the stigma of Amaryllis forviosissima, 
or on any other stigma, is contrary to Nature also. No 
flower has more baffled practitioners than that of this 
Jacobean Lily. I have had a thousand of them under 
ten ora dozen kinds of trials, and in a space running off 
twenty-eight years ; and tho recurrence of the genital, as 
Gilbert would say, after it once dried off, never recurred 
in any one flower, nor in any other flower that I ever 
handled. 
Mr. Knight’s theory that the seed-vessel is not altered 
in appearance by impregnation from another plant, I 
thought and accepted as decided by experience; but I 
recorded this spring an instance to the contrary, which is 
capable of proof at any time. The pods of Imatophyllum 
miniatum stand erect as the umbels of flowers, and the 
pods of I. cyrtanthiflorum hang down as the flowers do. 
By crossing the tw r o, the pods of the former become as 
pendent as those of the latter—the most curious thing I 
know of among plants. 
When you depart considerably from the wild types of 
our cultivated kinds or species, the influence of crossing 
is not so easily predicted; and when you reach the stage 
at which either of the parents lose their specific influence— 
lose their power of reproducing themselves by seeds, you 
can never predict the appearance, or the beauty, or mark¬ 
ings of any of the seedlings. 
In Geraniums and Calceolarias the leaf and the colour 
of the flower go more after the pollen parent than not; 
but the rule is not absolute in any genus that has yet- 
been proved. The seedlings take the habit of the mother 
if the father and mother are of the same constitutional 
strength ; not otherwise in any instance within my know¬ 
ledge. I am at this moment making practical use of this 
very point. 
Science puts it down as a rule, that if you cross two 
plants the seedlings must of necessity be intermediate 
in all their ways and looks ; but Nature is very different 
indeed. Kirst of all they would need to be near the 
original types; and, secondly, both must be of equal 
strength under equal circumstances, else it is ten to one 
if their offspring are intermediate. In all our common 
flowers the strength and the colour of the father, and the 
habit of the mother, are seen ten times to every instance 
of a perfectly intermediate degree, and both will get 
less and less to be relied on as the crossing of kinds is 
multiplied. 
The doctrine of superfoetation has been pushed to its 
limits by Dr. Herbert and myself from 1836 to 1846, 
and neither of us believed one word of it. We could not 
produce the faintest trace of it. Hundreds of self-seed¬ 
lings, without crossing, come as if they were of several 
parentages on the pollen side; and I am satisfied that 
scores of reputed crosses and crossings are of such origin, 
and merely an account of the trials that were made in¬ 
stead of the result obtained. No flower on earth is more 
easy to prove by if more than one pollen can influence a 
cross than any of the common Geraniums. Their stigma 
is parted into five parts, and each part rolls back from 
the rest, or from the centre ; and there are five seeds for 
every flower, corresponding to the five divisions of the 
stigma, or mother, as we say. Now, by applying five 
kinds of pollen, one kind to each division of the stigma, 
it is easy to conceive the possibility of each seed being 
influenced by that pollen only which dusted its corre¬ 
sponding division ; and if the scientific explanation of the 
process by which the pollen reaches the ovum, or skeleton 
seed, were correct, superfeetation would be inevitable, 
