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Vegetable mules supply an irrefragable argument in favour of the sexual system of botany. They are said to be numerous; and, like the mules of the animal kingdom, not always to continue their species by seed. There is an account of a curious mule from the Antirrbinum linaria, Toad-flax, in the Amoenit. Academ. V. I. No. 3. and many hybrid plants described in No. 32. Murray, Syft. Veg.
Linaria italica is a hybrid toad-flax between L. genistifolia and L. vulgaris, a cross which I have repeated in my garden. Drosera obovata is a hybrid sundew between D. anglica and D. rotundifolia. Primula variabilis is a hybrid between the two common primroses, P. officinalis and P. grandiflora.
In many instances the variety has been recorded to disappear after a certain lapse of time, the original specimens dying out and no new ones being produced. Linaria is a perennial herb, multiplying itself easily by buds growing on the roots, but even with this means of propagation its duration seems to have definite limits.
Other pelories are terminal and quite regular, and occur in some species of Linaria, where I observed them in Linaria dalmatica. The terminal flowers of many branches were large and beautifully peloric, bearing five long and equal spurs. About their origin and inheritance nothing is known. A most curious terminal pelory is that of the common foxglove or Digitalis purpurea.
This requirement is not at all restricted to the genus Linaria, as many instances are known to occur in different families. It is generally assumed that the pollen of any other individual of the same species is capable of producing fertilization, although it is to be said that a critical examination has been made in but few instances.
ANTIRRHINIUM Linaria. TOAD FLAX. The Flowers. An infusion of them is said to be very efficacious in cutaneous disorders; and Hammerin gives an instance in which these flowers, with those of verbascum, used as tea, cured an exanthematous disorder, which had resisted various other remedies tried during the course of three years. Woodville's Med. Bot. p. 372. AQUILEGIA vulgaris.
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.
One little garden linaria, at first employed as an ornament for hanging-baskets, has become so common on old walls and banks as to be now considered a mere weed, and exterminated accordingly by fashionable gardeners. Such are the unaccountable reverses of fortune, that one age will pay fifty guineas a bulb for a plant which the next age grubs up unanimously as a vulgar intruder.
As we descended the mountain almost by a succession of leaps, we overtook M. Gariod, deputy judge of Gap, engaged in botanizing among the rocks; and he informed us that among the rarer specimens he had collected in the course of his journey on the summit were the Polygonum alpinum and Silene vallesia, above Monta; the Leucanthemum alpinum, near the Hospice; the Linaria alpina and Cirsium spinosissimus on the Col; while the Lloydia serotina, Arabis alpina, Phyteuma hemisphericum, and Rhododendrum ferrugineum, were found all over the face of the rocky descent to the Pra.
Some of the rooms are still habitable, but the greater part are ruinous, and covered with climbers, both of wild flowers and of the naturalised garden plants of the adjoining shrubbery; the Arbor-tristis, with Hibiscus, Abutilon, etc., and above all, the little yellow-flowered Linaria ramosissima, crawling over every ruined wall, as we see the walls of our old English castles clothed with its congener L. Cymbalaria.
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