stramonium; and three of these hybrids produced many capsules, of which a half, or quarter, or lesser segment was smooth and of small size, like the capsule of the pure D. laevis, the remaining part being spinose and of larger size, like the capsule of the pure D. stramonium: from one of these composite capsules, plants perfectly resembling both parent-forms were raised.
Turning now to varieties. A SEEDLING apple, conjectured to be of crossed parentage, has been described in France (11/120. L'Hermes January 14, 1837 quoted in Loudon's 'Gardener's Mag.' volume 13 page 230.) which bears fruit with one half larger than the other, of a red colour, acid taste, and peculiar odour; the other side being greenish-yellow and very sweet: it is said scarcely ever to include perfectly developed seed. I suppose that this is not the same tree as that which Gaudichaud (11/121. 'Comptes Rendus' tome 34 1852 page 746.) exhibited before the French institute, bearing on the same branch two distinct kinds of apples, one a reinette rouge, and the other like a reinette canada jaunatre: this double-bearing variety can be propagated by grafts, and continues to produce both kinds; its origin is unknown. The Rev. J.D. La Touche sent me a coloured drawing of an apple which he brought from Canada, of which half, surrounding and including the whole of the calyx and the insertion of the foot-stalk, is green, the other half being brown and of the nature of the pomme gris apple, with the line of separation between the two halves exactly defined. The tree was a grafted one, and Mr. La Touche thinks that the branches which bore this curious apple sprung from the point of junction of the graft and stock: had this fact been ascertained, the case would probably have come into the class of graft-hybrids already given. But the branch may have sprung from the stock, which no doubt was a seedling.
Prof. H. Lecoq, who has made a great number of crossings between the differently coloured varieties of Mirabilis jalapa (11/122. 'Geograph. Bot. de l'Europe' tome 3 1854 page 405; and 'De la Fecondation' 1862 page 302.) finds that in the seedlings the colours rarely combine, but form distinct stripes; or half the flower is of one colour and half of a different colour. Some varieties regularly bear flowers striped with yellow, white, and red; but plants of such varieties occasionally produce on the same root branches with uniformly coloured flowers of all three tints, and other branches with half-and-half coloured flowers, and others with marbled flowers. Gallesio (11/123. 'Traite du Citrus' 1811 page 45.) crossed reciprocally white and red carnations, and the seedlings were striped; but some of the striped plants also bore entirely white and entirely red flowers. Some of these plants produced one year red flowers alone, and in the following year striped flowers; or conversely, some plants, after having borne for two or three years striped flowers, would revert and bear exclusively red flowers. It may be worth mentioning that I fertilised the PURPLE SWEET-PEA (Lathyrus odoratus) with pollen from the light-coloured PAINTED LADY: seedlings raised from the same pod were not intermediate in character, but perfectly resembled either parent. Later in the summer, the plants which had at first borne flowers identical with those of the PAINTED LADY, produced flowers streaked and blotched with purple; showing in these darker marks a tendency to reversion to the mother-variety. Andrew Knight (11/124. 'Transact. Linn. Soc.' volume 9 page 268.) fertilised two white grapes with pollen of the Aleppo grape, which is darkly variegated both in its leaves and fruit. The result was that the young seedlings were not at first variegated, but all became variegated during the succeeding summer; besides this, many produced on the same plant bunches of grapes which were all black, or all white, or lead-coloured striped with white, or white dotted with minute black stripes; and grapes of all these shades could frequently be found on the same foot-stalk.