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The single-flowered form extends over large areas in the Atlantic States of North America. They are very desirable, small-growing trees, and are described by Professor Sargent as being not surpassed in beauty by any of the small trees of North America. P. BACCATA. Siberian Crab. Siberia and Dahuria, 1784.
During all this time they have had a continuous pedigree of fertile and single-flowered individuals, throwing off in each generation a definite number of doubles. This ratio is not at all dependent on chance or accident, nor is it even variable to a remarkable degree. Quite on the contrary it is always the same, or nearly the same, and it is to be considered as an inherent quality of the race.
Hence we may infer that the single-flowered seeds are shorter lived than the doubles, and this obviously points to a greater weakness of the first. It is quite evident that there is some common cause for these facts and for the above cited experience, that the first and best pods give more doubles.
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.
So it is in the case of the double lilacs, a large number of varieties of which have recently been originated and introduced into commerce by Lemoine of Nancy. In the main they owe their origin to the crossing and recrossing of a single plant of the old double variety with the numerous existing single-flowered sorts. This double variety seems to be as old as the culture of the lilacs.
The "Swan" variety of the opium-poppy, a dwarfish double-flowered form of a pure white, contained some single-flowered and some red-flowered plants, when sown from commercial seed are said to be pure.
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. The single varieties are in respect to this character true to the original wild type.
The first point, is the question, which seeds become double-flowered and which single-flowered plants? Beyond all doubt, the determination has taken place before the ripening of the seed.
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