6 The Journal of Heredity 
The fact that five of these twelve 
ears produced lineate plants, although 
the parental progenies were normal 
sreen, involves no genetic complexities. 
The progenies which produced these 
five ears were all the result of crossing 
sister plants, and it seems not un- 
reasonable to assume that one parent 
in each combination was heterozygous 
for lineate and the other homozygous 
for normal green. 
The ratio of green to lineate plants 
in three of the progenies shown in 
Table III is as close an approximation 
to the Mendelian monohybrid 3:1 as 
could be expected with the small 
numbers involved, but the remaining 
two progenies clearly do not conform. 
It may well be that in these two 
aberrant progenies we are witnessing 
a recurrence of the mutation which will 
behave subsequently as a Mendelian 
unit character in full accord with the 
progenies just discussed. An alterna- 
tive explanation lies in the wide varia- 
tion in the expression of this character, 
indicating the influence of a number of 
modifying factors which may obscure 
the true nature of most of the lineate 
plants. 
The variations in expression, how- 
ever, are no larger than is found in 
most strains of japonica or similar 
stripe patterns. Japonica forms of 
striping similarly occur in aberrant 
ratios, several instances having ap- 
peared in our breeding blocks where one 
or two plants in several hundred exhibit 
white striping. The same progenies 
produce a few striped plants in succes- 
sive plantings. This behavior has not 
interfered with analysis in progenies 
where the ratios are Mendelian and the 
segregation is sharp. There is, there- 
fore, little reason why lineate leaves 
should not take their place with the other 
chlorophyll variations in maize affording 
another character with which to test the 
linear arrangement of factors. 
The Heredity and Environment of a Great Botanist 
The story of Joseph Hooker’s life- 
work is, in one aspect, the history of 
the share taken by botany in establish- 
ing the theory of evolution and the 
effect produced upon it by acceptance of 
that theory. He began with unrivalled 
opportunities and made unrivalled use 
of them. As a botanist, he was born 
in the purple, for in the realm of 
botany his father, Sir William Hooker, 
was one of the chief princes, and he 
had at hand his father’s splendid herba- 
rium and the botanic garden which he 
had made one of the scientific glories of 
Glasgow University. 
Joseph Hooker’s earliest recollections 
are preserved in an autobiographical 
fragment, set down late in his life. 
Noteworthy among the events that 
emerge from childish forgetfulness, like 
hill-tops above a sea of mist, is the early 
love of nature, and especially of plants, 
inborn in him and indeed inherited from 
both lines of his parentage. His father 
and his mother’s father were both 
botanists, and singularly enough they 
both began their studies as such with 
the mosses, quite independently of one 
another; so that, being confessedly ‘a 
born Muscologist,’’ he playfully dubs 
himself ‘‘the puppet of Natural Selec- 
tion.”—From Life and Letters of Sir 
Joseph Dalton Hooker, by Leonard 
Huxley; in 2 vols. London: John 
Murray, 1918. 
