Analogous statements have been made with
respect to the stamens of Pelargonium. With some of the Melastomaceae,
seedlings raised by me from flowers fertilised by pollen from the
shorter stamens, certainly differed in appearance from those raised from
the longer stamens, with differently coloured anthers; but here, again,
there is some reason for believing that the shorter stamens are tending
towards abortion. In the very different case of trimorphic heterostyled
plants, the two sets of stamens in the same flower have widely different
fertilising powers.) In opposition to this conclusion is the fact that a
bud is in one sense a distinct individual, and is capable of
occasionally or even not rarely assuming new external characters, as
well as new constitutional peculiarities. Plants raised from buds which
have thus varied may be propagated for a great length of time by grafts,
cuttings, etc., and sometimes even by seminal generation. (8/2. I have
given numerous cases of such bud-variations in my 'Variation of Animals
and Plants under Domestication' chapter 11 2nd edition volume 1 page
448.) There exist also numerous species in which the flowers on the same
plant differ from one another,--as in the sexual organs of monoecious
and polygamous plants,--in the structure of the circumferential flowers
in many Compositae, Umbelliferae, etc.,--in the structure of the central
flower in some plants,--in the two kinds of flowers produced by
cleistogene species,--and in several other such cases.
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