The Origin of the Cultivated Cineraria

Abstract

I HAVE read with some interest the communications on this subject which have appeared in NATURE, and I may add that I have examined living plants of the species in question with Mr. Thiselton-Dyer. My memory also serves me sufficiently far back to remember a great variety of different “strains” of Cineraria, in which they had not got so far away from the parent C. cruenta as they now are. I say the parent C. cruenta, because I believe that we have to deal with races or strains, obtained by selection according to the taste of the several selectors, and not with the descendants of hybrids between different species. I think Mr. Bateson has relied too implicity on the literature of the subject. Many of the records of hybrid productions in the vegetable kingdom are based upon groundless assumptions; mere seminal variations having been mistaken for crosses. It requires some skill and care to raise hybrids in the Compositae; and when you have raised your hybrid, even assuming a fertile one, you can only propagate it vegetatively. All stability is gone. But it is not so with selected seminal variations of a given species. They will intercross most freely, and give birth to new varieties without end; yet each one of those varieties may be reproduced from seed, by careful isolation, without a single “bastard” appearing. There are several instances among our cultivated plants of this great plasticity combined with stability, but I will give only one—the China Aster. I select this because there can be no question of hybridity; and there is as great, or even a greater, variety than in the herbaceous Cinerarias. But with regard to the latter, I think our experience and the trustworthy literature go to prove that it is an analogous case. Careful selection, year after year, has resulted in the various fixed races or strains offered by florists. I am aware that the letters on this subject by no means exhaust it; but I think it may be safely asserted that selection has yielded much more than sports.