Bees and bumble-bees are unable to crawl into
the narrow tubular flowers, and to bring the fertilizing pollen to the
stigma. Ripe capsules with seeds [468] have never been seen in the wild
state. The only writer who succeeded in sowing seeds of the peloric
variety was Wildenow and he got only very few seedlings. But even in
artificial pollination the result is the same, the anthers seeming to be
seriously affected by the change. I tried both self-fertilization and
cross-pollination, and only with utmost care did I succeed in saving
barely a hundred seeds. In order to obtain them I was compelled to
operate on more than a thousand flowers on about a dozen peloric plants.
The variety being wholly barren in nature, the assumption that the
plants in the different recorded localities might have a common origin
is at once excluded. There must have been at least nearly as many
mutations as localities. This strengthens the hope of seeing such a
mutation happen in one's own garden. It should also be remembered that
peloric flowers are known to have originated in quite a number of
different species of _Linaria_, and also with many of the allied species
within the range of the Labiatiflorae.
I will now give the description of my own experiment. Of course this did
not give the expected result in the first year.
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