by the nature of the soil.
Plants which have become variegated as seedlings, generally transmit
their character by seed to a large proportion of their progeny; and Mr.
Salter has given me a list of eight genera in which this occurred.[875]
Sir F. Pollock has given me more precise information: he sowed seed
from a variegated plant of _Ballota nigra_ which was found growing
wild, and thirty per cent. of the seedlings were variegated; seed from
these latter being sown, sixty per cent. came up variegated. When
branches become variegated by bud-variation, and the variety is
attempted to be propagated by seed, the seedlings are rarely
variegated; Mr. Salter found this to be the case with plants belonging
to eleven genera, in which the greater number of the seedlings proved
to be green-leaved; yet a few were slightly variegated, or were quite
white, but none were worth keeping. Variegated plants, whether
originally produced from seeds or buds, can generally be propagated by
budding, grafting, &c.; but all are apt to revert by bud-variation to
their ordinary foliage. This tendency, however, differs much in the
varieties of even the same species; for instance, the golden-striped
variety of _Euonymus Japonicus_ "is very liable to run back to the
green-leaved, while the silver-striped {384} variety hardly ever
changes."[876] I have seen a variety of the holly, with its leaves
having a central yellow patch, which had everywhere partially reverted
to the ordinary foliage, so that on the same small branch there were
many twigs of both kinds. In the pelargonium, and in some other plants,
variegation is generally accompanied by some degree of dwarfing, as is
well exemplified in the "Dandy" pelargonium. When such dwarf varieties
sport back by buds or suckers to the ordinary foliage, the dwarfed
stature sometimes still remains.[877] It is remarkable that plants
propagated from branches which have reverted from variegated to plain
leaves[878] do not always (or never, as one observer asserts) perfectly
resemble the original plain-leaved plant from which the variegated
branch arose: it seems that a plant, in passing by bud-variation from
plain leaves to variegated, and back again from variegated to plain, is
generally in some degree affected so as to assume a slightly different
aspect.

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