130 Atavism. 
striped flowers but I have not yet come across suitable 
material for the investigation of this point. 
In 1892 I had raised from bought seed of A. ma jus 
liiteum rubro-striatiun a large bed of plants the flowers 
of which were all striped. I gathered the seed of one 
individual for the next year's crop (1893). I obtained 
about 40 flowering plants in this way; the majority bore 
flowers with fine stripes, and here and there flowers 
occurred of which one-half was a uniform red. There 
were four plants which only bore pure red flowers. Of 
these I selected the strongest, enclosed their spikes in 
bags and fertilized their flowers with their own pollen. 
Besides these I dealt in the same way with two striped 
plants, with few and fine stripes. 
As soon as the seeds germinated in the following 
spring a difference became visible : the seedlings from the 
seed of striped plants had green foliage, those from the 
red, however, were reddish brown. This difference was 
particularly striking on the under surface of the later 
leaves of the young plants. On the former bed 152 plants 
flowered, on the latter 71. Both groups consisted of 
plants with striped flowers and plants with red ones, but 
as I had expected, in very different proportions. The 
proportions in the offspring from the two types of parents 
were as follows : 
STRIPED RED 
Finely striped parents 98% 2% 
Red flowered parents 24% 76% 
Most of the striped flowerr were finely striped 
coarsely striped plants only occurred in the proportions 
of 6 and 7%. 
The characters of both races are therefore heritable 
but, so to speak, incompletely so. We may describe the 
