Page - 112 - in The Origin of Species

112 ORIGIN OF SPECIES Teady before the pollen of that flower is ready, so that these so-named dichogamous plants have in fact separated sexes, and must habitually be crossed. So it is with the reciprocally dimorphic and trimorphic plants previously alluded to. How strange are these facts ! How strange that the pollen and stigmatic surface of the same flower, though placed so close together, as if for the very purpose of self-fertilisation, should be in so many cases mutually useless to each other? How simply are these facts explained on the view of an oc- casional cross with a distinct individual being advantageous or indispensable ! If several varieties of the cabbage, radish, onion, and of some other plants, be allowed to seed near each other, a large majority of the seedlings thus raised turn out, as I have found, mongrels : for instance, I raised 233 seedling cabbages from some plants of different varieties growing near each other, and of these only 78 were true to their kind, and some even of these were not perfectly true. Yet the pistil of each cabbage-flower is surrounded not only by its own six stamens but by those of the many other flowers on the same plant; and the pollen of each flower readily gets on its own stigma without insect agency ; for I have found that plants carefully protected from insects produce the full number of pods. How, then, comes it that such a vast number of the seedlings are mongrelized? It must arise from the pollen of a dis- tinct variety having a prepotent effect over the flower's own pollen ; and that this is part of the general law of good being derived from the intercrossing of distinct individuals of the same species. When distinct species are crossed the case is reversed, for a plant's own pollen is almost always prepotent over foreign pollen; but to this subject we shall return in a future chapter. In the case of a large tree covered with innumerable flowers, it may be objected that pollen could seldom be carried from tree to tree, and at most only from flower to flower on the sanre tree ; and flowers on the same tree can be consid- ered as distinct individuals only in a limited sense. I believe this objection to be valid, but that nature has largely pro- vided against it by giving to trees a strong tendency to bear flowers with separated sexes. When the sexes are separated,