ture of a
graft-hybrid.

There is a variety of the hazel with dark-purple leaves, like those of
the copper-beech: no one has attributed this colour to disease, and it
apparently is only an exaggeration of a tint which may often be seen on
the leaves of the common hazel. When this variety is grafted on the
common hazel,[924] it sometimes colours, as has been asserted, the
leaves below the graft; but I should add that Mr. Rivers, who has
possessed hundreds of such grafted trees, has never seen an instance.

Gaertner[925] quotes two separate accounts of branches of dark and
white-fruited vines which had been united in various ways, such as
being split longitudinally, and then joined, &c.; and these branches
produced distinct bunches of grapes of the two colours, and other
bunches with grapes either striped or of an intermediate and new tint.
Even the leaves in one case were variegated. These facts are the more
remarkable because Andrew Knight never succeeded in raising variegated
grapes by fertilising white kinds by pollen of dark kinds; though, as
we have seen, he obtained seedlings with variegated fruit and leaves,
by fertilising a white variety by the variegated dark Aleppo grape.
Gaertner attributes the above-quoted cases merely to bud-variation; but
it is a strange coincidence that the branches which had been grafted in
a peculiar manner should alone have thus varied; and H. Adorne de
Tscharner positively asserts that he produced the described result more
than once, and could do so at will, by splitting and uniting the
branches in the manner described by him.

I should not have quoted the following case had not the author of 'Des
Jacinthes'[926] impressed me with the belief not only of his extensive
knowledge, but of his truthfulness: he says that bulbs of blue and red
hyacinths may be cut in two, and that they will grow together and throw
up a united stem (and this I have myself seen), with flowers of the two
colours on the opposite sides. But the remarkable point is, that
flowers are sometimes produced with the two colours blended together,
which makes the case closely analogous with that of the blended colours
of the grapes on the united vine-branches.

Mr. E. Trail stated in 1867, before the Botanical Society of Edinburgh
(and has since given me fuller information), that sev