30 Latent and Semi-Latent Characters. 
curve of a half race can be tran formed into a bilateral 
curve by selection and high nutrition. I shall recur to 
this point shortly. 
The well-known researches of FRITZ MULLER with 
Abutilon give instances of half curves. 1 MULLER ob- 
tained the following figures from a culture with seeds 
from flowers with six petals: 145 with 5 petals, 103 with 
6, and 13 with 7. Of more recent investigations we may 
mention those of BATESON and PERTZ with Veronica 
BiiA'bannin according to which the normal cases always 
composed 70-90% of the culture in spite of the selection 
of the extreme variants in petal-number as seed-parents, 
the remaining 30-10% being composed of abnormal cases 
in a rapidly diminishing series. 2 The fruits of Aqmlegia 
are pentamerous, but 6-, and still more rarely 7-merous, 
ones occur. The fruit of the cotton is also pentamerous, 
but I have found several tetramerous and occasional 
trimerous ones. Papavcr Argenwne has tetramerous 
flowers, but specimens with 5, and less often with 6 
petals, also occur ; by sowing seeds from the latter I was 
not able to obtain any increase in the number. 
Duplications of leaves, concrescence of umbel-rays in 
UmbclUferae, of the fruit stalks of Cruciferae, of the 
fruits themselves in the Compositac and so forth, the 
adnation of an axial bud with its axillary branch and a 
number of other anomalies behave as half races. The 
abnormal cases, which are of course infinitely rarer than 
the normal ones, become rarer in proportion as they de- 
part from the normal. It is unnecessary to give a longer 
list here, I may just mention the catacorolla on the outer 
1 HERMANN MULLER, Die Befruchlung dcr Bhimen, p. 450. 
2 W. BATESON and Miss D. F. M. PERTZ, Notes on the Inheritance 
of Variation in the Corolla of Veronica Bu.vbaumii. Proceed. Cam- 
bridge Phil. Soc., Vol. X, Pt. II, p. 78. 
