126 Atavism. 
The result of this inquiry shows that the first eight 
groups merge continuously into one another ; but that 
between the striped and red flowers a broad gulf is fixed. 
The red are not connected with the striped by a series 
of transitional forms as the lemon yellow are with the 
broad striped ; red flowers with small yellow patches may 
occur, but they are at most very rare. 
The shape of the curves is far more regular than I 
had anticipated; but the reds obviously have no place 
in it; I mean, they are far too numerous in proportion. 
They are therefore obviously not the extreme variants 
of the series but constitute a group which is perfectly 
distinct from the striped although the size of this group 
varies directly with the amount of striping in the other. 
After the composition of the commercial race had 
been determined in this way, my next task was to dis- 
cover the nature of the offspring resulting from the self- 
fertilization of the individual components of this diverse 
assemblage. I have confined the solution of this problem 
to the three chief types : finely striped, coarsely striped, 
and uniformly red. Let us begin with the two former 
groups. 
The offspring of the parent plant A (Fig. 22 and table 
on page 125) contained many coarsely striped individ- 
uals (Fig. 22b} ; when they were in flower I transplanted 
some very coarsely striped ones to a special bed, picked 
off all their flowers and young fruits and enclosed all 
the buds which subsequently opened to insure self-fertili- 
zation. In the same way I treated some plants from the 
bed B (Fig. 22B) with almost yellow flowers. I har- 
vested and sowed the seeds of each plant separately. 
In August, 1898, when the beds were in full flower, 
T determined the amount of striping by the method al- 
