No other capsules were produced by
this plant. Three flowers on the short-styled plant were legitimately fertilised
with pollen from the long-styled, and all three produced capsules, containing
respectively no less than 8, 9, and 10 seeds. Three other flowers on this plant,
which had not been artificially fertilised, produced capsules containing 5, 1,
and 5 seeds; and it is quite possible that pollen may have been brought to them
by insects from the long-styled plant growing in the same garden. Nevertheless,
as they did not yield half the number of seeds compared with the other flowers
on the same plant which had been artificially and legitimately fertilised, and
as the short-styled plants of the two previous species apparently evince some
slight capacity for fertilisation with their own-form pollen, these three
capsules may have been the product of self-fertilisation.
Besides the three species now described, the yellow-flowered L. corymbiferum is
certainly heterostyled, as is, according to Planchon, L. salsoloides. (3/6.
Hooker's 'London Journal of Botany' 1848 volume 7 page 174.) This botanist is
the only one who seems to have inferred that heterostylism might have some
important functional bearing. Dr. Alefeld, who has made a special study of the
genus, says that about half of the sixty-five species known to him are
heterostyled.
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