The relationship between the number of sporophylls and the 
numbers of stamens and pistils—a criticism 
HELENE M. Boas 
In a paper entitled, ‘The interrelationship of the number of 
stamens and pistils in the flowers of Ficaria,’’ Harris* has at- 
tempted, by statistical methods, to throw some light on the 
biological factors which determine the sex of an organism. The 
relative numbers of pistils and stamens present are assumed to 
indicate which sex is more influented as the total number of 
sporophylls increases. Without a knowledge of the number of 
functional spores that are produced the ratio of the two kinds of 
sporophylls can hardly be considered as a fundamental measure 
of the sex of a flower. Nevertheless the quantitative relations 
between stamens and pistils, if handled so as to be of biological 
and not purely statistical significance, may suggest more precisely 
the factors that influence the development of the two sexes. 
Harris correlates the deviations of the total number of sporo- 
phylls and those of the pistils and stamens from their “probable 
values.”” He means by this the average frequency of pistils and 
stamens to be expected according to the total number of sporo- 
phylls. He does this rather than correlate directly with the 
numbers of pistils and stamens in order to eliminate, as he 
believes, the spurious correlation which would exist in the latter 
case. He finds the correlation between the number of sporophylls 
and the deviation of the pistils from their “probable number’ to 
be of equal magnitude to that of the stamens, but positive, 
while that of the stamens is negative. From this he concludes that 
as the number of sporophylls increases, the pistils increase rela- 
tively more rapidly than the stamens. 
It can be shown that this result necessarily follows from the 
fact that there are more stamens than pistils while their varia- 
* Biol. Bull. 34: 7-17. 1918. 
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