Now, if this plan of selecting very
fine capsules during favourable seasons had been followed for obtaining the
normal standards, instead of taking, during various seasons, the first capsules
which came to hand, the standards would undoubtedly have been considerably
higher; and thus the fact of the six foregoing plants appearing to yield an
unnaturally high percentage of seeds may, perhaps, be explained. On this view,
these plants are, in fact, merely fully fertile, and not fertile to an abnormal
degree. Nevertheless, as characters of all kinds are liable to variation,
especially with organisms unnaturally treated, and as in the four first and more
sterile classes, the plants derived from the same parents and treated in the
same manner, certainly did vary much in sterility, it is possible that certain
plants in the latter and more fertile classes may have varied so as to have
acquired an abnormal degree of fertility. But it should be noticed that, if my
standards err in being too low, the sterility of all the many sterile plants in
the several classes will have to be estimated by so much the higher. Finally, we
see that the illegitimate plants in the four first classes are all more or less
sterile, some being absolutely barren, with one alone almost completely fertile;
in the three latter classes, some of the plants are moderately sterile, whilst
others are fully fertile, or possibly fertile in excess.
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