The buntings exemplify local adaptive radiation, but may be hybridizing which could eventually produce a new species endemic to the island.
Great attention has been given lately to the important experiments upon the results of hybridizing certain cultivated varieties of plants which were published so long ago as 1865, by the Abbe Mendel, but failed to attract notice until thirty-five years later, sixteen years after his death (see Mendelism).
It is possible that the hybridizing of the potato with one or other of the wild types of tuberous Solanums may give rise to a variety which shall be immune, though unfortunately most are themselves liable to the attacks of the fungus, and one of the few crosses so made between the common potato and Solanum Maglia has exhibited the same undesirable trait.
On the European continent queen-rearing apiaries are plentiful, but less attention is paid there to hybridizing than to keeping the respective races pure.
