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According to my view nearly all these ordinary reversions are due to crosses, and it is for this reason that I proposed to call them by a separate name, that of "vicinists."
I have tried many other species, but always with the same result. Such atavists only arise by cultivation in the proximity of allied varieties, never in isolation. They are not real atavists, but only vicinists. In order to show this yet more clearly, I made another experiment with the white selfheal.
From these I had 119 flowering plants, out of which 106 were peloric and 13 one-spurred. The great majority, some 90%, were thus shown to be true to their new type. Whether the 10% reverting ones were truly atavists, or whether they were only vicinists, caused by stray pollen grains from another culture, cannot of course be decided with sufficient certitude.
The majority of the offspring returned to the parental type, but two plants were true dwarfs. From these the requisite degree of purity for commercial purposes was reached, the vicinists not being more numerous than 10% of the entire number. The same mutation had been observed a year earlier in the same nursery in a lot of Saponaria calabrica.
In order to avoid a return to this phase of the question, another use of the vicinists should at once be pointed out. It is the possibility of increasing the yield of the new variety. If space admits of sowing the seeds of the vicinists, a quarter of the progeny may be expected to come true to the new type, and if they were partly pollinated by the dwarfs, even a larger number would do so.
They fertilize the flowers from the beginning, and the damage will have been done long before the day of inspection comes around. Crosses are unavoidable and hybrid seeds will unavoidably come into the harvest. Their number may be limited by an early eradication of the vicinists, or by the elimination of the first ripe seeds before the beginning of the regular harvest, or by other devices.
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