Memorials of John Ray / edited by Edwin Lankester.

Date:
1846
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Memorials of John Ray / edited by Edwin Lankester. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    227/242 (page 209)
    which are usually and naturally of another colour ; as for example, white bears, white foxes, white hares, white ravens, white blackbirds, and many others, as I myself have seen in Italy. That hares upon the Alps, and in the cold northern regions, do in the winter time change their colour to white, and in the summer again return to their usual and natural colour, though I find it delivered by good authors, and attested by credible persons, I dare not peremptorily assert; but that the imfluence of the soil and climate is great, appears farther in our Lanca- shire and Sussex beasts; of which the former have fair, large, and well-spread horns, the latter small and crooked; and if into Sussex you translate these cattle out of Lancashire, their race by degrees will degenerate, and come to the shape of the natives. So we see the horses in Flanders have large and hairy pasterns, which the English breed have not: and it is reported for a truth, that there is a pasture upon a hill called Hasel- bedge, in the Peak of Derbyshire, near little Hucklow, which will turn the hair of kine that feed thereupon to a grey colour in three years space. Now if diversity of soil, food, climate, or other external circumstances, breed such variety and difference among animals of the same species, much more then may it among plants, which are less free in the choice of their nourishment, and con- stantly .affixed to the place where they chance to spring up. Two ways there are of getting or producing these differences. First, by sowing the seed of that plant whereof you desire a new kind, in a rich soil, or in a soil different from its natural, or that where it grew before. So if you sow the seed (for example) of a single July flower in good ground, among many that bear single, it shall give you some roots that bear double flowers, and some of different colours from their mother plant, which you may propagate by the slip. The plants that are most apt to be thus diversified by ne ne July