Gaines and Stevenson: Rye-Wheat Hybrids 



intelligence, emotional control, and 

 environment. This offers no contradic- 

 tion, for these qualities are positively 

 correlated with each other. Though 

 many individual exceptions will come 

 to mind, it may be taken as certain that 

 on the average the more intelligent man 

 will be more able to control, not only 

 his emotions, but also his environment. 

 It is fair, therefore, to pick out intelli- 

 gence as the key. 



Now if anything is well demon- 

 strated, it is that intelligence depends 

 primarily on heredity: that unless one 

 is born to become intelligent one can 



never become so. Education is, of 

 course, necessary, but something to 

 educate is a prerequisite. Fundamen- 

 tally, the only way in which the United 

 States as a nation can attain to a 

 higher permanent level of morality, is 

 to contain more intelligent people. 

 And the only way of reaching this 

 condition is by such changes in the 

 birth-rates of different parts of the 

 population as will make the most intel- 

 ligent families produce more children, 

 and the mentally defective stop repro- 

 ducing — in a word, by eugenics. 



RYE-WHEAT AND WHEAT- 

 RYE HYBRIDS 



E. F. Gaines 



AND 



F. J. Stevenson 



State College of Washington 



CROSSES between wheat and rye 

 are rare and difificult to make 

 owing to the tendency to come 

 sterile but after seven years' work at the 

 Washington Agricultural Experiment 

 Station reciprocal crosses of these two 

 species have been obtained. This 

 marks a new step in plant breeding 

 work, as a cross in w^hich rye was used 

 as the mother parent has never been 

 reported so far as the writers are aware. 

 Several crosses between wheat and rye 

 in which wheat was used as the female 

 parent have been obtained by other 

 investigators. Leighty- reports the 

 work done by Carman about 1880, by 

 which several crosses of wheat and rye 

 were secured. All of these possessed a 

 high degree of sterility and in the words 

 of Carman, "The trial finally came to 



an end on account of the absolute 

 barrenness of the latest progeny." 

 Leighty also reports^ the occurrence 

 of several natural wheat-rye hybrids 

 which were found at the Arlington 

 Station and elsewhere. These resembled 

 wheat in their general appearance but 

 were intermediate to wheat and rye in 

 such characters as head length, pubes- 

 cence of peduncle, size of culm, thick- 

 ness of culm, density of the pith, and 

 shape and size of glumes. 



McFadden^ reports the production 

 of two wheat-rye hybrids which were 

 wheat-like in appearance and sterile 

 to a high degree. Backhouse^ states 

 that wheat-rye hybrids can be obtained 

 more readily with some varieties of 

 wheat than with others and that "cross- 

 ability" is heritable in the varieties 



' Contribution from the Agricultural Experiment Station, State College of Washington, 

 Pullman, Washington. 



-Leighty, Clyde E. 1916. Carman's wheat-rye hybrids. Journal of Heredity 7; 420-427. 



' 1920. Natural wheat-rye hybrids of 1918. Journal of Heredity 11: 



129-136. 



^ McFadden, E. A. 1917. Wheat-rye hybrids. Journal of Heredity (?; 335-336. 



^Backhouse, W. O. 1916. Note on the inheritance of "crossabilitv." Journal of Genetics 6: 

 91-94. 



