THE MUTATIONS OF LYCOPERSICUM. 157 



I selected seed from the fruit of the best plants of this crop of 

 1898, cured, and sealed them in a packet, and planted a random 

 portion of them in my garden in 1899. I expected to produce true 

 Acme plants from this sowing because of the well-known compara- 

 tive stability of that variety and of my care in selecting and preserving 

 the seed; and also because no other tomato plants were grown with 

 them or in the same neighborhood, from which cross fertilization 

 might have occurred. To my surprise, however, all the plants which 

 grew from those seeds were distinctly different from the parent plants, 

 not only as to fruit, but as to specific details of plant structure; and 

 they were all alike in those characteristics. It may be incidentally 

 mentioned that a difference was recognizable in the earliest stage of 

 growth of the plantlets; the cotyledons were proportionately short, 

 placed low on the stem, and in a goodly number of instances, triple; 

 a character which I have never observed in any other tomato plantlets. 

 At maturity the plants were sturdy and compact, standing erect with 

 little support until after the first fruits were visible, and reaching a 

 mature length of only about two thirds of that of the parent plants; 

 haulms strong and comparatively few; foliage dark green; petiole-mid- 

 ribs short and strong; leaflets moderately broad, not distant, sessile or 

 nearly so, and their surfaces strongly rugose; fruit similar to that of 

 the parent plants in size, shape and consistence, but of finer flavor and 

 more delicate in color, changing from a dark chlorophyl green to 

 cherry red or light crimson through a neutral or flesh color, and not 

 through yellow. I preserved no seed from this crop of 1899, and 

 supposed the fruit variety was therefore lost, as indeed it was, but two 

 years later I recovered it, as will presently be shown. This fruit dif- 

 fered considerably from any other of the numerous varieties known to 

 me ; but the plants had essentially the same specific characters as those 

 which had previously been produced by gardeners, known as the 

 potato-leafed variety of tomato. It was by those characters that I 

 designated L. solanopsis as a distinct species. 



In the spring of 1900 I purchased from a Philadelphia company 

 of seed growers a packet of their ' selected Acme tomato seed/ which 

 was grown in 1899 on a Pennsylvania farm, more than a hundred 

 miles from the place where my first Acme plants were grown. From 

 this seed I grew thirty plants to maturity, every one of which, with its 

 fruit, was true to the Acme variety as I have just described it for my 

 crop of 1898. Fig. 2 represents one of those plants as it appeared 

 in the early stage of its growth. Its smaller size than Fig. 1 is due 

 only to the relative size of the growing plants at the time the photo- 

 graphs were taken. The conditions of cultivation in this case were 

 identical with those in the former case; no other tomato plants were 

 grown with them, nor were any grown in the neighborhood; and the 



