PLANTS RAISED FROM BRAZILIAN SEED.
Fritz Muller sent me from South Brazil seeds of plants which were there absolutely sterile when fertilised with pollen from the same plant, but were perfectly fertile when fertilised with pollen from any other plant. The plants raised by me in England from these seeds were examined by Professor Asa Gray, and pronounced to belong to E. Californica, with which they were identical in general appearance. Two of these plants were covered by a net, and were found not to be so completely self-sterile as in Brazil. But I shall recur to this subject in another part of this work. Here it will suffice to state that eight flowers on these two plants, fertilised with pollen from another plant under the net, produced eight fine capsules, each containing on an average about eighty seeds. Eight flowers on these same plants, fertilised with their own pollen, produced seven capsules, which contained on an average only twelve seeds, with a maximum in one of sixteen seeds. Therefore the cross-fertilised capsules, compared with the self-fertilised, yielded seeds in the ratio of about 100 to 15. These plants of Brazilian parentage differed also in a marked manner from the English plants in producing extremely few spontaneously self-fertilised capsules under a net.
Crossed and self-fertilised seeds from the above plants, after germinating on bare sand, were planted in pairs on the opposite sides of five large pots. The seedlings thus raised were the grandchildren of the plants which grew in Brazil; the parents having been grown in England. As the grandparents in Brazil absolutely require cross-fertilisation in order to yield any seeds, I expected that self-fertilisation would have proved very injurious to these seedlings, and that the crossed ones would have been greatly superior in height and vigour to those raised from self-fertilised flowers. But the result showed that my anticipation was erroneous; for as in the last experiment with plants of the English stock, so in the present one, the self-fertilised plants exceeded the crossed by a little in height. It will be sufficient to state that the fourteen crossed plants averaged 44.64, and the fourteen self-fertilised 45.12 inches in height; or as 100 to 101.