I once found in a meadow such a form of the meadow-buttercup
(_Ranunculus_ acris_), and succeeded in keeping it in my garden for
several years, but it did not make seeds and finally died. Camellias are
known to have both types of double flowers. The petalomanous type is
highly regular in structure, so much so as to be too uniform in all its
parts to be pleasing, while the conversion of stamens into petals in the
alternative varieties gives to these flowers a more lively diversity of
structure. Lilies have a variety called _Lilium candidum flore pleno_,
in which the flowers seem to be converted into a long spike of bright,
white narrow bracts, crowded on an axis which never seems to cease their
production.
It is manifestly impossible to decide how all such sterile double
flowers have originated. [332] Perhaps each of them originally had a
congruent single-flowered form, from which it was produced by seed in
the same way as the double stocks now are yearly. If this assumption is
right, the corresponding fertile line is now lost; it has perhaps died
out, or been masked. But it is not absolutely impossible that such
strains might one day be discovered for one or another of these now
sterile varieties.
Returning to the stocks we are led to the conception that some varieties
are absolutely single, while others consist of both single-flowered and
double-flowered individuals.
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