uniformly coloured variety, they ever
afterwards fail to produce striped seedlings.[157] Another case is in some
respects more curious: plants bearing peloric or regular flowers have so
strong a latent tendency to reproduce their normally irregular flowers,
that this often occurs by buds when a plant is transplanted into poorer or
richer soil.[158] Now I crossed the peloric snapdragon (_Antirrhinum
majus_), described in the last chapter, with pollen of the common form; and
the latter, reciprocally, with peloric pollen. I thus raised two great beds
of seedlings, and not one was peloric. Naudin[159] obtained the same result
from crossing a peloric Linaria with the common form. I carefully examined
the flowers of ninety plants of the crossed Antirrhinum in the two beds,
and their structure had not been in the least affected by the cross, except
that in a few instances the minute rudiment of the fifth stamen, which is
always present, was more fully or even completely developed. It must not be
supposed that this entire obliteration of the peloric structure in the
crossed plants can be accounted for by any incapacity of transmission; for
I raised a large bed of plants from the peloric Antirrhinum, artificially
fertilised by its own pollen, and sixteen plants, which alone survived the
winter, were all as perfectly peloric as the parent-plant. Here we have a
good instance of the wide difference between the inheritance of a character
and the power of transmitting it to crossed offspring. The crossed plants,
which perfectly resembled the common snapdragon, were allowed to sow
themselves, and, out of a hundred and twenty-seven seedlings, eighty-eight
proved to be common snapdragons, two were in an intermediate condition
between the peloric and normal state, {71} and thirty-seven were perfectly
peloric, having reverted to the structure of their one grandparent. This
case seems at first sight to offer an exception to the rule formerly given,
namely, that a character which is present in one form and latent in the
other is generally transmitted with prepotent force when the two forms are
crossed. For in all the Scrophulariaceae, and especially in the genera
Antirrhinum and Linaria, there is, as was shown in the last chapter, a
strong latent tendency to become peloric; and there is also, as we have
just seen, a still stronger tendency in all peloric plants to reacquire
their normal irregular structure. So that we have two opposed latent