Excerpt from Torreya, Vol. 5: A Monthly Journal of Botanical Notes and News That distinct and separate qualities expressed in recognizable external characters may appear suddenly, or disappear completely, in a series of generations of plants, has been a matter of common observation so long that it would be difficult to hunt out and fix upon the first instance of record. The significance of such phenomena was obviously beyond the comprehension of the earlier botanists and it is evident that a rational recognition of the phylogenetic value of sports and anomalies necessarily awaited the development and realization of the conceptions of unit-characters of the minute structures which are the ultimate bearers of heredity, and of the inter-dependence of the two in such manner as to constitute actual entities as embodied in Darwin's pangenesis, de Vries' intra-cellular pangenesis and in Mendels' investigations upon heredity. It is equally apparent that a proper interpretation of the facts in question, and their distinction from the results of hybridization was possible only by means of the analysis of the collated results of observations upon series of securely guarded pedigree-cultures, in which the derivation of all of the individuals of several successive generations had been noted. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.