a 
ae ee ee lee! US lee 
92 MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN. 
But altogether the evidence confirms the conclusions from 
another study’® that the correlation between somatic char- 
acters and fertility is generally very slight. 
6. Correlation in Seed Production between the Fruits of 
the Inflorescence. 
If the number of seeds which develop per fruit is depend- 
ent upon the available plastic material, as seems somewhat 
probable from the results of the two preceding sections, 
then one might expect an intra-inflorescence correlation for 
number of seeds per fruit. That is, one would expect that 
the characters of an individual fruit—judged in comparison 
with the condition in the population as a whole as a standard 
—would not be independent of, but correlated with, those 
of the other fruits of the inflorescence. 
The great difficulty of the problem lies in its complexity. 
Within a given inflorescence an abnormally large number 
of seeds in one fruit might necessitate an abnormally small 
number in another fruit, because of the inadequacy of 
plastic materials. But the available materials may differ 
widely from inflorescence to inflorescence, and as a conse- 
quence, all of the fruits of some inflorescences be much 
better supplied than those of others. The tendency of the 
first of these putative conditions would be to produce a 
negative correlation between the number of seeds per fruit 
of the inflorescence, while that of the second would be to 
bring about a positive correlation. As yet, I see no way of 
differentiating these factors and estimating their relative 
intensities. Certainly, this is not possible in the present 
material. It seems worth while, however, to make a begin- 
ning in the problem by determining what the actually 
existing correlation is.17 
16 Harris, J. Arthur. On the Correlation between Somatic Charac- 
ters and Fertility. Biometrika 8 :52-65. 1911. 
17 This problem is being considered in some detail for a widely differ- 
ent species. See a paper, The Influence of the Seed upon the Size of the 
Fruit in Staphylea, in the Botanical Gazette 53 : 204-218; 396-414. 
1912. 
