128 The Ottawa Naturalist. [Oct. 



it has also the horse-shoe shaped base so characteristic of 

 A. fatua. Thus it resembles in colour, shape and size the variety 

 from which it originated and in other respects the wild species, 

 excepting that the basal hairs are absent or nearly so. 



The growing plant is also an exact counterpart of its 

 parent. Those selected from "Banner" oats have the spreading 

 head, while the "Storm King" sports are side oats and show 

 the strong stems and massive grains of that variety so that 

 they could not be separated by the plants if it were not for the 

 long awns sticking out of the head. I have not been able to 

 examine manv different kinds of oats but what I have gone 

 over carefully "Banner," "New Market," "Abundance," 

 "Storm King" and "Bumper King" have all contained some 

 proportion of sports, "New Market" and "Storm King" showing 

 the most. 



It is interesting to note that these sports breed true to 

 type apparently without exception, and further that absolutely 

 pure seed is always Hable to produce them, the parent from 

 which they spring being eavsily recognizable in the offspring. 

 There is one other feature of importance from an agricultural 

 point of view, namely the retarded germination so characteristic 

 of .4. fatua is not a character of these sports, the germination 

 being so far as experiments have shown in exactly the same 

 proportion as the parent variety, so that the apprehension that 

 they might become a bad weed seems to be groundless. Whether 

 they will prove troublesome on account of their awns remains to 

 be seen, but the chances are against this being the case, as sports 

 have probably occurred for ages past in oats but have been over- 

 looked. 



It is difficult to arrive at a satisfactory theory as to the 

 cause of these sports; but, granting that the original type, from 

 which cultivated oats were first selected, was heavily awned 

 and had the basal characters of Avena fatua, we might surmise 

 that thev are retrogressions in the features noted to the original 

 progenitors of present day oats. 



It seems strange, however, that this probable form of 

 atavism should be active in all, or nearly all, breeds of oats and 

 that both types A saliva and .4. orieninlis should be equally 

 active in producing sports. 



I have not attempted to go into the matter of the true 

 nature or cause of what I have termed sports in this paper, as 

 to whether they have relation to the De Vries mutations, or 

 whether any other facts or hypotheses are able to explain them. 

 This is outside my province and may be safely left to men more 

 capable of looking into such matters. 



I 



