Thus Max Wichura doubts whether
hybrids ever revert to their parent forms, and he experimented on
uncultivated species of willows, while Naudin, on the other hand, insists
in the strongest terms on the almost universal tendency to reversion in
hybrids, and he experimented chiefly on cultivated plants. Gartner further
states that when any two species, although most closely allied to each
other, are crossed with a third species, the hybrids are widely different
from each other; whereas if two very distinct varieties of one species are
crossed with another species, the hybrids do not differ much. But this
conclusion, as far as I can make out, is founded on a single experiment;
and seems directly opposed to the results of several experiments made by
Kolreuter.
Such alone are the unimportant differences which Gartner is able to point
out between hybrid and mongrel plants. On the other hand, the degrees and
kinds of resemblance in mongrels and in hybrids to their respective
parents, more especially in hybrids produced from nearly related species,
follow, according to Gartner the same laws. When two species are crossed,
one has sometimes a prepotent power of impressing its likeness on the
hybrid. So I believe it to be with varieties of plants; and with animals,
one variety certainly often has this prepotent power over another variety.
Hybrid plants produced from a reciprocal cross generally resemble each
other closely, and so it is with mongrel plants from a reciprocal cross.
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