likewise had gone on for six or seven generations crossing with white sheep, but still black lambs were invariably produced. Similar facts could be given with respect to tailless breeds of various animals. For instance, Mr. Hewitt[71] states that chickens bred from some Rumpless fowls, which were reckoned so good that they won a prize at an exhibition, "in a considerable number of instances were furnished with fully developed tail-feathers." On inquiry, the original breeder of these fowls stated that, from the time when he had first kept them, they had often produced fowls furnished with tails; but that these latter would again reproduce rumpless chickens. Analogous cases of reversion occur in the vegetable kingdom; thus "from seeds gathered from the finest cultivated varieties of Heartsease (_Viola tricolor_), plants perfectly wild both in their foliage and their flowers are frequently produced;"[72] but the reversion in this instance is not to a very ancient period, for the best existing varieties of the heartsease are of comparatively modern origin. With most of our cultivated vegetables there is some tendency to reversion to what is known to be, or may be presumed to be, their aboriginal state; and this would be more evident if gardeners did not generally look over their beds of seedlings, and pull up the false plants or "rogues" as they are called. It has already been remarked, that some few seedling apples and pears generally resemble, but apparently are not identical with, the wild trees from which they are descended. In our turnip[73] and carrot-beds a few plants often "break"--that is, flower too soon; and their roots are generally found to be hard and stringy, as in the parent-species. By the aid of a little selection, carried on during a few generations, most of our cultivated plants could probably be brought back, without any great change in their conditions of life, to a wild or nearly wild condition: Mr. Buckman has effected this with the parsnip;[74] {32} and Mr. Hewett C. Watson, as he informs me, selected, during three generations, "the most diverging plants of Scotch kail, perhaps one of the least modified varieties of the cabbage; and in the third generation some of the plants came very close to the forms now established in England about old castle-walls, and called indigenous." * * * * *