Nebst den scharf hervortretenden Characteren müssen da, wo es sich im Allgemeinen um eine grössere oder geringere Aehnlichkeit handelt, auch jene Merkmale eingerechnet werden, welche oft schwer mit Worten zu fassen sind, aber dennoch hinreichen, wie jeder Pflanzenkenner weiss, um den Formen ein fremdartiges Aussehen zu geben.
Alongside sharply emerging characteristics, account must also be taken, when it comes to greater or lesser similarity in general, of those traits that are often difficult to capture in words, but nevertheless are sufficient, as every plant expert knows, to give an alien appearance to the forms.
characteristic = Character See p. 7, s. 8.
plant expert = Pflanzenkenner Druery has “connaisseur”, Bateson “plant specialist” and Sherwood “everyone familiar with plants”. The latter translation is actually fair, since Pflanzenkenner included amateur botanists in Mendel’s time, as well as people who gained their expertise of plants in other professions than academic botany, such as gardeners.
forms = Formen See p. 3, s. 8.
alien = fremdartiges See p. 5, s. 6. Bateson has “strange”, which is slightly misleading, whereas Sherwood suggests “appearance of a stranger”. That there is something about all Hungarian plants that lets them appear alien to Austrian botanists formed part of Kerner’s argument about “good” and “bad” species; see commentary on previous sentence.