Plantago Lanccolata Rcunosa. 157 
more numerous unbranched ears. In the second summer 
often almost all the ears on healthy individuals are 
branched even when their number reaches 50-60 per 
plant. In the first year I found that as a rule there were 
10-20 branched ears, and sometimes as many as 30 or 
even more occurred on each plant. In fact we may 
assume that, on the average, and with ordinary methods 
of cultivation, about one-third of the ears will be branched 
during the first summer; for instance, in 1898 I found 
amongst 439 ears on 30 individuals 136 or 31% which 
were branched. It goes without saying that the atavistic 
individuals were excluded from these countings. 
I have also made some direct experiments to deter- 
mine the influence of individual vigor on the develop- 
ment of the anomaly. In the first place I have grown 
very weak plants and have then got them to grow stronger 
gradually. For this purpose I made use of the plantain's 
well-known property of producing buds from its roots. 
As the roots are all very thin, the plantlets obtained in 
this way are very weak at first, nor do they grow up 
as quickly as seedlings. 
For the purpose of this experiment I selected (March 
1893) ten plants which had had 10-25 branched ears 
each in the previous year. I pulled them out of the 
ground, cut off the mass of their roots and planted these, 
throwing away the rosettes and any leaf-buds that might 
be present. I put the roots of each individual straight 
into the ground without separating them. Radical buds 
were produced in hundreds, often so many from one 
bundle of roots that there was not room for all of them 
to develop. In the middle of June, that is, after about 
three months, they began to flower. At first there were 
only 40% branched ears, with only one or two lateral 
