Plant Chimaeras and Graft Hybrids

Abstract

THIS excellent concise account of those peculiar combinations of plant tissues, belonging to two different varieties, species, or even genera, which are known as chimaeras, will be welcomed by both students and teachers. A clear and useful distinction is drawn between chimaeras and graft-hybrids, the latter term being retained for plants which (supposedly) arose from nuclear fusions between scion and stock. This conception is precise and there is nothing in it that is impossible on theoretical grounds. The author, however, is very distinctly in favour of the chimaeral hypothesis for all those examples which have been relatively well investigated. This hypothesis was put forward by Baur as a result of his studies of Pelar gonium varieties, though the name ‘chimaera’ was used by Winkler for a branch built up of two genetic ally distinct tissues. The ‘chimaeral hypothesi's assumes that the pattern found in the mature organ of a chimaeric structure “is merely a development of the pattern already present at the growing point”. Plant Chimaeras and Graft Hybrids. By Prof. W. Neilson Jones. (Methuen's Monographs on Biological Subjects.) Pp. viii + 136. (London: Methuen and Co., Ltd., 1934.) 3s. 6d. net.