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Updated: June 21, 2025
In our experiments on the origin of peloric varieties and double flowers we were guided in the choice of our material by a survey of the evidence already at hand. We chose the types known to be most commonly produced anew, either in the wild state or under the conditions of cultivation. In both instances our novelty was a variety in the ordinary sense of the word.
But here unfortunately the high degree of sterility of the peloric plants, as previously noted, makes the experimental evidence a thing of great difficulty. During the course of several years I isolated and planted together the peloric individuals already mentioned, all in all some twenty plants.
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.
Like other pelories it has five equal stamens instead of four unequal ones, and a corolla with five equal segments instead of an upper and a lower lip. It shows the peloric condition in all of its flowers and is often combined with a small increase of the number of the parts of the whorls. It is for sale under the name of erecta, and may be had in a wide range of color-types.
Another observation, although it is of a negative character, gains in importance from this point of view. I refer to the total lack of intermediate steps between normal and peloric individuals. If such links had ordinarily been produced previous to the purely peloric state they would no doubt have been observed from time to time.
Through all this diminution the peloric type remains unchanged and therefore becomes so much the purer, the weaker the branches on which it stands. I am not sure whether such peloric flowers have ever been purely pollinated and their seed saved separately, but I have often observed that the race comes pure from the seed of the zygomorphic flowers.
They flowered profusely and produced in 1889 only one, and in 1890 only two peloric structures. I saved the seeds in 1889 and had in 1890-1891 the third generation. These plants likewise flowered only in the second year, and gave among some thousands of symmetrical blossoms, only one five-spurred flower.
Compared with the tedious experimental production of the peloric toad-flax, the attempt to produce a double flower has a distinct attraction. The peloric toad-flax is nothing new; the experiment was only a repetition of what presumably takes place often within the same species.
The consequence was that I had no reason to make large sowings, and grew only enough young plants to have about 50 in bloom in the summer of 1894. Among these, stray peloric flowers were observed in somewhat larger number than in the previous generations, 11 plants bearing one or two, or even three such abnormalities.
This raceme is a weak but exact repetition of the first, bearing symmetrical foxgloves all along and terminating in a peloric structure. On the branches these anomalies are more or less reduced, according to the strength of the branch, and conforming to the rule of periodicity, given in our lecture on the "five-leaved" clover.
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