Volume XI DECEMBER, 1921 No. 3 



DWARF FORMS IN BARLEY. nrw yoh« 



ik/i anjcal 

 By BUNGO MIYAZAWA. uakubn 



(With Plate XX.) 



With the object of barley breeding a number of /", plants between 

 Goldenmelon^ and the Japanese variety called Sekitori were grown in 

 1914 at the Agricultural Experiment Station, Kanagawa-Ken, .Japan. 

 One of these F^ plants was crossed back by Goldenmelon in that year, 

 and a dwarf plant appeared in 1915 among the 96 offspring resulting 

 from this back-cross. As the hereditary behaviour oi-this dwarf may be 

 of some interest I am going to describe here briefly the results of my 

 investigations. The characters of this plant, together with those of its 

 parents, are as follows : 



Although this dwarf plant produced shoots more abundantly than 

 we have ever seen in any variety, over half of the shoots thus developed 

 failed to produce ears ; and moreover they were smaller than either of 

 the two parents in various respects, as length and width of K-af, size of 

 kernels, etc. 



In November 1915 about 40 seeds of this dwarf plant were sown, 

 almost all of which came to germination, but towards Januar}^ or February 

 1916 some died, and only 24 completed their growth. Of the latter three 

 bypes are easily distinguished with respect, to the height of plant, 

 length of ear and awn, etc., each of which contains in its turn normal 

 and dwarf forms, so that we have altogether three kinds of noi-mals and 

 three kinds of dwarfs. Below I will classify all these simply into two 

 classes, viz. normal and dwarf. According to this classification the 24 

 plants above cited consist of 18 dwarf and 6 normal individuals, whence 



1 Though this variety is here called by this name, it seems that it differs from real 

 Goldenvielon. 



Joum. of Gen. xi 1^ 



