EXPERIMENTS IN HYBRIDIZATION.
It is well known to cultivators of the Camellia that the venerable President of the American Pomological Society, the Hon. Marshall P. Wilder, achieved great success in the raising of new varieties, yielding double flowers, from seed hybridized by himself, and that many of the flowers raised by him were exquisite models of perfection of form. This marked success he attributes largely to three things, first, that in the selection of the seed-bearing parent he used hybrids, believing that every change effected by cross-fertilization is a remove from the normal form, and therefore more easily susceptible of continued mutations; second, that in the selection of the flower to be impregnated he had special reference to the strength and prominence of the style, the form of the corolla, and the perfection of its petals; and third, that he used only pollen taken from an anther which was supported by a petaloid stamen, that is, a stamen which had taken on the form, more or less, of a petal. He regarded this petaloid form of the stamen as the incipient stage towards a full petalous form, and that when he fertilized such flowers with this petaloid pollen, he was more likely to secure double seedlings, with petals more or less multiplied, and oftentimes perfectly double, than when the pollen was taken from anthers borne upon perfect stamens. And the larger and better developed the petaloid stamen was, that is, the more nearly the stamen had taken on the form of a petal, the better the chance for obtaining finely formed double flowers. His experiments led him to the conclusion that single or semi-double flowers with perfect corollas are more certain to produce flowers of a regular symmetrical formation, than those whose corollas have been irregular, with considerable variation in the size and form of the different petals; and likewise that when the style was feeble, distorted, or imperfectly developed, the results were likely to be very unsatisfactory.
As some of our readers are making experiments in the production of double flowers, we hope they will give us the results of their labors for publication.
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