ORIGIN OF SPECIES 513 
from them. The seeds germinated promptly and the crop of thirty 
young plants grew well, but from their first appearance above 
ground they showed a marked difference from Acme plants. 
When they had reached the fruiting stage they had developed 
into typical representatives of the solanoid group, and not of their 
parent atavic group ; showing that the difference from their parent 
form was more than varietal in character. Furthermore, every 
plant of that crop possessed identically the same characteristics, 
all having shared equally and fully in the mutation. The new 
form was varietally characterized by an excellent quality of fruit, 
but it was different in flavor and shade of color from that of the 
Acme, and ripened earlier than did that of the parent plants. I 
saved no seed from the fruit of the new variety and therefore sup- 
posed it to be lost, as indeed it was. 
In 1900 I planted in the same garden-plot Acme tomato seed 
which I purchased from a seedsman who grew it on a Pennsyl- 
vania farm, more than a hundred miles from the place where the 
seed of my first crop was grown. These seeds also produced a 
uniform crop of typical Acme plants and fruit. I selected seeds 
from fruit of the best of that crop of thirty Acme plants and sowed 
them in my garden in the spring of 1901, and grew in that year 
also thirty plants from those seeds, again expecting to get a harvest 
of Acme tomatoes. On the contrary, the result was an exact dupli- 
cation of my experience of 1899, every plant and every fruit par- 
taking fully and uniformly in the duplicated mutation. * 
One naturally inquires whether mutation of any other variety 
than the Acme would have occurred in my garden, whether it is 
an inherent quality of that variety to give only one mutative 
result, and that toward the Solanoid group, and what are the 
natural and artificial conditions of my garden. I have made no 
€xperiments with any other varieties than the Acme and its progeny, 
the new One, and can therefore only refer to these. The Acme 
Variety is now about twenty-five years old, and has been one of 
* An account of these two mutations of identical character was published in Sci- 
Ste for November 29, 1901, but a sufficiently clear distinction between the combined 
Varietal and specific characteristics of the plants resulting from that mutation was not 
ein made. That statement also was written from a horticultural rather than from a 
ical standpoint. 
