406 Ever-sporting Varieties 



and a whole series of steps may easily be ob- 

 served from sufficiently large cultures. But 

 they are always relatively rare, and any lot of 

 plants conveys the idea of a dimorphous race, 

 the small twisted stems contrasting strongly 

 with the tall straight ones. 



A sharper contrast between good representa- 

 tives of a race and their atavists is perhaps to 

 be seen in no other instance. All the details 

 contribute to the differentiation in appearance. 

 The whole stature of the plants is affected by 

 the varietal mark. The atavists are not, as 

 in the case of the poppies, obviously allied with 

 the type by a full range of intermediate steps, 

 but quite distant from it by their rarity. There 

 seems to be a gap in the same way as between 

 the striped flowers of the snapdragon and their 

 uniform red atavists, while with the poppies 

 the atavists may be viewed as being only the 

 extremes of a series of variations fluctuating 

 around some average type. 



From this reason it is as interesting to appre- 

 ciate the hereditary position of the atavists of 

 twisted varieties as it was for the red-flowered 

 descendants of the striped flowers. In order to 

 ascertain this relation it is only necessary to iso- 

 late some of them during the blooming-period. 

 I made this experiment in the summer of 1900 

 with the eighth generation of my race, and con- 



