Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club/Volume 5/02

BULLETIN
OF THE
TORREY BOTANICAL CLUB.
Vol. V. ]	New-York, February 1874.	[ No. 2.

9

§ 75 Variations. — I saw in the Bulletin a notice of an Iris which changed its color.   I have in my little garden a root of I. Germanica, a fleur-de-lis of the white variety.  There are no blue ones in the neighborhood that I know.  Four years ago one of the outer divisions of the perianth of one flower was dark blue.  The next year one whole flower was dark blue, two other flowers on the same stalk were white.  In the following year all the flowers on one stalk were blue, and all the flowers on the other stalks white.  This year it bore only white flowers.

I am led to question the permanence of single variations (hut not the permanence of the forms of variation) from having been unable to procure the same variety for two seasons in succession in the same place.   For instance, our common Sensitive Fern varies into var. obtusilobata, but the variation is not permanent.  I often find it, and once found a large bed of it, in every possible intermediate form.  The next year going to look for some Adder-tongue ferns growing near, I looked carefully for the obtusilobata, but not one appeared.  Some remarkable variations of Aspidium acrostichoides I have found the second year perfect forms of our finest evergreen fern.  The Adder-tongue fern too varies very much.  On the high cold sand plains of North Elba it is two or three inches high and perfectly orbicular.  In Elizabethtown, Essex County, I found it ten inches high, ovate and very fine.  Here it is quite plenty in swamps and pastures, but is so slender and acute as to be difficult of detection among the grass.

L. A. M.