148 MISSOURI’ BOTANICAL GARDEN. 
with exactitude what was the nature of the ancestors of our 
plants in the Sydney Botanical Garden, but for the present 
purpose the data gathered at Berkeley are sufficient. 
The specimens of Oxalis crenata grown at Berkeley con- 
firm in the most striking manner the views on the trans- 
missibility of fasciations which at the present time are 
more generally held than formerly. Up to ten or fifteen 
years ago the concensus of opinion was that fasciation was 
an individual phenomenon and that its appearance depended 
entirely on external conditions. But a more careful study 
of the phenomena and especially the observations of de 
Vries * have shown that fasciation is a character which may 
be inherited, though to a varying degree. In some individ- 
uals it may seem to have disappeared, but only to reappear 
in their descendants. The latent condition of the charac- 
ter is also shown by trees which for some years produce 
fasciated branches and then normal ones, to be again fol- 
lowed by fasciated limbs. It has been shown by de Vries 
that in such cases the manifestation of fasciation is due to 
favorable external conditions. Unfavorable conditions 
have a tendency to prevent it. At Berkeley, plants of 
thus diversiloba, the poison oak, which had shown fas- 
ciation in the growth of three successive years, ceased to 
produce fasciations after being transplanted. Numerous 
similar instances might be quoted. As Goebel f points 
out and de Vriest again recalls, wherever external in- 
fluences cause the appearance of fasciations or anomalous 
structures in general the tendency to this must be present 
in a latent condition. If this tendency is absent all efforts 
to bring these structures about are futile. 
That the fasciated character may remain dormant is well 
* deVries, Hugo. Die Mutationstheorie. 23541. Leipzig. 1901-1903, 
— Here other references will be found. 
t+ Goebel K. Organographie der Pflanzen. 13158, Jena. 1898. 
t Loe. cit. 551. 
