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Updated: May 13, 2025
The fasciated honey-eater has loudly called "with a voice that seemed the very sound of happiness"; the leaden flycatcher, often silent but seldom still, has twittered and whispered plaintively; the sun-birds are playing gymnastics among the lemon blossoms, and the centre of activity for butterflies is the red-flowered shrub bordering the wavering path.
The same holds good with other monstrosities, and badly nourished specimens of rich races with twisted or fasciated stems always tend to reversion. This reversion, however, is not necessarily correlated with the hereditary percentage and therefore does not always indicate a lessening of the degree of inheritance.
Hence, for selection purposes, the atavists must be considered to be in no way inferior to the typical specimens. If it had been possible to apply this principle to twisted and fasciated plants, and perhaps even to other monstrosities, I think that it will readily be granted that the chance of bringing even these races up to a percentage of 90% would have been large enough.
It yielded last summer as high a percentage as 65 of twisted individuals, many of them repeating the monstrosity on several branches. After some occasional observations Gypsophila paniculata seems to promise similar results. These and some others seem to belong to the same group as the valerian and to constitute only poor or so-called half-races. Next to the torsions come the fasciated stems.
This proportion corresponds with the degree of inheritance which is shown in many years by the largest and strongest fasciated stems. It strengthens our conclusion as to the innermost constitution of the double races or ever-sporting varieties. Twisted stems and fasciations are very striking monstrosities. But they are not very good for further investigation.
Fasciated hawkweeds and twisted teasels gave the same average constitution of the offspring from highly monstrous, and from apparently wholly normal individuals. In other words the fullest development of the visible characteristic was not in the slightest degree an indication of better hereditary tendencies.
It is a common thing for fasciated branches and stems to divide at the summit into a number of subdivisions, and ordinarily this splitting occurs in the lower part, sometimes dividing the entire fasciated portion. In biennial species the rosette of the root-leaves of the first year may become changed by the monstrosity, the heart stretching in a transverse direction so as to become linear.
A variety of this species, with a fasciated or monstrous habit, is sometimes cultivated. Introduced in 1830.
This shows that even in those cases an improvement may be expected, if only the means can be found to subject the twisted and the fasciated races to the same sharp test as the tricotylous varieties. Much remains to be done, and the principle of the selection of parents according to the average constitution of their progeny seems to be one of the most promising in the whole realm of variability.
The aged sisters draw us into life: we wail, batten, sport, clip, clasp, sunder, dwindle, die: over us dead they bend. First, saved from waters of old Nile, among bulrushes, a bed of fasciated wattles: at last the cavity of a mountain, an occulted sepulchre amid the conclamation of the hillcat and the ossifrage.
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