young trees, now about a foot
or two in height, show the least signs of weeping. Mr. Rivers formerly
sowed above twenty thousand seeds of the weeping ash (_Fraxinus
excelsior_), and not a single seedling was in the least degree
pendulous: in Germany, M. Borchmeyer raised a thousand seedlings, with
the same result. Nevertheless, Mr. Anderson, of the Chelsea Botanic
Garden, by sowing seed from a weeping ash, which was found before the
year 1780, in Cambridgeshire, raised several pendulous trees.[49]
Professor Henslow also informs me that some seedlings from a female
weeping ash in the Botanic Garden at Cambridge were at first a little
pendulous, but afterwards became quite upright: it is probable that
this latter tree, which transmits to a certain extent its pendulous
habit, was derived by a bud from the same original Cambridgeshire
stock; whilst other weeping ashes may have had a distinct origin. But
the crowning case, communicated to me by Mr. Rivers, which shows how
capricious is the inheritance of a pendulous habit, is that a variety
of another species of ash (_F. lentiscifolia_) which was formerly
pendulous, "now about twenty years old has long lost this habit, every
shoot being remarkably erect; but seedlings formerly raised from it
were perfectly prostrate, the stems not rising more than two inches
above the ground." Thus the weeping variety of the common ash, which
has been extensively propagated by buds during a long period, did not,
with Mr. Rivers, transmit its character to one seedling out of above
twenty thousand; whereas the weeping variety of a second species of
ash, which could not, whilst grown in the same garden, retain its own
weeping character, transmitted to its seedlings the pendulous habit in
excess!

Many analogous facts could be given, showing how apparently capricious
is the principle of inheritance. All the seedlings from a variety of
the Barberry (_B. vulgaris_) with red leaves inherited the same
character; only about one-third of the seedlings of the copper Beech
(_Fagus sylvatica_) had purple leaves. Not one out of a hundred
seedlings of a variety of the _Cerasus padus_, with yellow fruit, bore
yellow fruit: one-twelfth of the seedlings of the variety of _Cornus
mascula_, with yellow fruit, came true:[50] and lastly, all the trees
raised by my father from