is intermediate between the numbers in corn and 'Trip- 
sacum better than does the theory of common ancestry. 
It accounts much better for the apparent fact that teo- 
sinte is intermediate between corn and ‘Tripsacum, at 
least in a broad sense, in position of the knobs. 
TEOSINTE INTERMEDIATE IN PLANT CHARACTERS 
One important category of circumstantial evidence for 
the hybrid origin of teosinte shows that teosinte has few 
if any plant characters of its own; it is either intermedi- 
ate between corn and Tripsacum or similar to one or the 
other in essentially all of its characters. The significance 
of this fact has been almost completely overlooked. 
Randolph (32) makes a fleeting reference to it, but states 
merely that the ‘‘very stable cytological features, ’’ which 
are discussed on previous pages of the present paper, are 
more important. 
Thirty-two characters, in addition to those of chromo- 
some morphology, which usually distinguish corn from 
Tripsacum, were listed by Mangelsdorf and Reeves (26). 
Reeves later (35) studied 28 characters, two of which 
were repetitions of the 82 previously studied. In the 58 
characters thus examined, teosinte is either intermediate 
between corn and Tripsacum or very similar to one of 
them, with two doubtful exceptions. ‘Teosinte was actu- 
ally intermediate in one of the characters designated as 
exceptional— frequency of large leaf hairs—but the dif- 
ferences between corn, teosinte and ‘Tripsacum were not 
statistically significant, and this character, therefore, 
does not constitute a true exception. In the other ex- 
ceptional character—depth of alveolus of the rachis— 
Tripsacum appeared to be intermediate between corn and 
teosinte, teosinte having the deepest alveolus of the three. 
It was recognized that for eight of these characters, the 
plant samples were too small for completely dependable 
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