INFANT INDUSTRIES 171 



years. Somewhat more than forty years ago one Gregor Mendel, an 

 Austrian priest, was raising garden peas. Instead of eating them, as 

 you and I would have done, he observed and recorded the facts of 

 inheritance they served to illustrate. Among other things, he discov- 

 ered that in the case of pairs of opposing characters possessed by the 

 parents of any given generation, some would be inherited in such a 

 manner that half of the offspring, while apparently possessing only 

 the character A, would in reality have also the other one, B, in their 

 make-up — not visible at all, but ready to appear in another generation. 

 That is to say, we may be indeed of the Jekyll-Hyde type, only the 

 Jekyll alone appears in us, the Hyde in some of our children or vice 

 versa. Without going into particulars, you can easily see that if, 

 under such circumstances, the visible or dominant character is dis- 

 criminated against by selection, the race possessing that character dis- 

 appears ; but as Dr. Shull has recently remarked, discrimination against 

 the recessive or hidden character is ordinarily impossible, since in two 

 thirds of the cases it is not visible at all, but is stored away in the 

 germ cells to appear only in the next generation. The various im- 

 portant economic results flowing from the Mendelian researches — 

 which were overlooked by naturalists for forty years, have been set forth 

 in various places, but I may call attention to the possibility that certain 

 forms of both virtue and vice, equally discriminated against by our 

 modern civilization, are Mendelian recessives, and that is why they 

 continue to appear in spite of everything. We stone the prophets, but 

 it has not occurred to us to stone also the brothers and sisters of the 

 prophets. 



A few days ago, Dr. J. C. Arthur, of Purdue University, our fore- 

 most student of plant rusts, was here in Boulder. He told me some- 

 thing about his researches on the parasitic fungi of the different species 

 of sunflower. It seems that certain sunflowers, which we will call A, 

 have rusts which appear to grow exclusively upon them; while others, 

 which we term C, are similarly afflicted. European mycologists had 

 found that these parasites could not be transferred from A to C, or 

 vice versa, and so had assumed that they were different species of 

 fungi. But Dr. Arthur made the remarkable discovery that if the 

 rust from A was sown on the common sunflower, which we will now 

 term B, it would grow there, and would produce spores which would 

 grow quite successfully on C. The process could also be reversed, causing 

 the rust of C to grow on A, after a sojurn upon the intermediate B. 

 It is greatly to the honor of the authorities of the Indiana Experiment 

 Station, that they have — as I believe — supported Dr. Arthur in this 

 work of his, and appreciated its value. In some places known to me, 

 it would be quite otherwise, and I do not doubt that some of you are 

 wondering whether, after all, this is a mere botanical curiosity. 



