"B.," Leesburg, Fla., says : "I have found your articles on fertilization very interesting. Since I read about the fig in your magazine, I thought that since those fruits have been raised for so many years by means other than seeds, perhaps they do not require fertilizing at all. For instance, the ordinary banana down here, which I believe is properly the plantain, seems to set all its fruit as far as the plant is able to sustain them; but the cultivated banana is seedless because it has been divided for so long that the seeds have become abortive. I think perhaps the varieties of oranges which have abortive seeds may not require cross-fertilizing. Don't you think that in the case of the self-fertilized fig the fleshy part may form all right, but if the seeds were sown they would prove deficient in vitality ? Some numbers back you told me about bud variation, and that you considered that from a fertilizing point of view it made distinct individuals. That I can quite believe, but bud variation was known in Darwin's time, as Rose Isabella Sprunt and some chrysanthemums, were known in his time; but then I suppose Darwin considered floriculture a morbid taste for monstrosities and perhaps overlooked it.

I am afraid I am rather one of those persons who "want to know you know," but don't you think the case where two black grapes were crossed and produced a white one, one of their ancestors was a white one, just as in the case in human beings where some one has a faint "dash of de tar brush" one of their children may have the features of a negro? or do you think that in some cases by crossing two plants much alike you might get the opposite? for I know that canary breeders never pair two crested ones because they are apt to turn out bald".

[Any questions from correspondents are welcome, as none of us know all we want to learn, and even the Editor is indebted to correspondents for suggestions leading to investigations that might not otherwise be undertaken. In the present case it may be remarked that there is no necessity for looking back to ancestry to account for the appearance of variations. If there were but one or a single pair of parents in each case, the variations we see must be wholly new and not reversions. If there were originally but one apple, some of the forms or colors that have since been introduced must be wholly new creations. So with seedless fruits. There are seedless apples, pears, persimmons and other fruits well-known to have sprung at once into existence, and with no relation to continual propagation as in the case of the banana.

In the case of the fig, we are not so sure that the seeds are as defective as they are generally supposed to be. In these matters very few people examine for themselves. Even with a fig before them it is more than likely it would not be touched, but some book be looked up to find out what somebody said ages ago. We have now in sight of our window a young fig tree that came up in some kitchen waste and could only have sprung from seed of a dried fig. It is not lively this was the only perfect seed. It is a well-known axiom in natural seed sowing that there are hundreds of perfect seeds produced for every one that in the struggle for life ever gets to be a plant. - Ed. G. M].