272 



The Journal of Heredity 



mercial fascicled pepper and has been 

 freely used in the breeding work of the 

 experiment station. In the Golden 

 Queen, a standard yellow- fruited sort, 

 there are many characters that pair 

 well with those of the Red Cluster. 

 Thus the Cluster is a small, low ]jlant 

 with long, narrow leaves, and the fruits 

 are small, upright, slender and hot; 

 while the Queen makes a tall, much- 

 branched plant with large normal leaves 

 and bearing large, pendent, yellow, sweet 

 fruits. These facts are mentioned to 

 show that along with the chief distinc- 

 tion of intcrnodal growth are a number 

 of other opposing characters and con- 

 firm the opinion that the cross between 

 these two kinds of peppers is a fairly 

 wide one. 



It was comparatively easy to secure 

 combinations of the Queen upon the 

 Cluster, but the large nimiber of at- 

 tempts to get the reciprocal have failed 

 excepting in rare instances, and this work 

 has been repeated each year for several 

 seasons. The few plants that have 

 formed the F2 of the Cluster upon the 

 Queen have exhibited a mixture of the 

 two types of internodal growth (normal 

 and brachysm), usually formed but few 

 flowers of abnormal structure from which 

 fruits rarely grew and these were seed- 

 less or nearly so. All attempts to 

 breed these plants with the parents 

 varieties have failed. 



It is noted that the direction of this 

 cross is the same as that in which no 

 cross was obtained with the musk- 

 melons, namely, the degenerate upon 

 the normal type. 



Many thousands of plants have been 

 grown in the first five generations of the 

 cross of the Queen upon the Cluster and, 

 so far as the brachysm is concerned, con- 

 form closely to the rule of a Mendelian 

 recessive; that is, it did not appear in the 

 Fi, but practically in the ratio of one 

 to three in the F2- It might be re- 

 marked in passing that these crosses as 

 grown in the seedbeds for setting in the 

 field rarely showed any indication of 

 brachysm, that is, the young ])lants were 

 normal in stem- and leaf-develc^pment up 

 to the place where the first flower bud 

 is to form. If the setting were delayed 

 until the i)lant l>loomed, the grower 



would be able to eliminate the degen- 

 erates. 



MANY ABNORMALITIES 



In the F2, for example, a field of a few 

 thousand plants presented all imaginable 

 combinations of the various characters 

 of the parents in their association with 

 Ijrachysm; some of them were pitiable 

 or amusing as the observer may decide. 

 For example, there were low, unbranched 

 plants with the stem ending in a single 

 sphere of large, broad leaves the tips 

 of which reach down to the ground all 

 around the i)lant, the whole suggesting 

 a dust moj). Within this head of foliage 

 there may be a fruit or so of the Queen 

 type pendent and sadly cramped and dis- 

 torted by its fellows. Again the plant 

 may have formed a large head from 

 which stems emerged and ended in heads 

 of leaves and fruits like the one from 

 which they came, and in turn sent up 

 normal stems that repeated the clus- 

 tered habit of growth, so that a "three- 

 story" plant may be seen at the close 

 of the season. Brachysm is so closely 

 associated with flower bearing that when 

 the vegetative functions only are active 

 the stems and leaves are normal. 



The crosses in question show that 

 when the fascicled type of foliage ex- 

 pressed itself there were associated with 

 it more or less fully those characters 

 common to the Red Cluster parent, 

 namely, small size of plant and fruit 

 and non-prolificness ; and here, as has 

 been noted with the muskmelon, there 

 seems to be a causal relation that 

 needs to be borne in mind by those who 

 would deduce rules of breeding from 

 such degenerates. 



Figure 12 shows one of the dwarf pep- 

 ]3er plants upon the left in striking con- 

 trast with the standard type of the same 

 cross that occu]iics the main portion of 

 the engraving. 



In breeding tomatoes many unusual 

 plants have come to light. For ex- 

 ample, several years ago, while breeding 

 the Dwarf Chami)ion with Ciolden Sun- 

 rise to obtain a beautiful blush-cheeked 

 kind (an ignis Jatuiis i)erhaps, long since 

 aljandoned), an Fj plant was obtained, 

 among hundreds of the normal type, 

 that attracted much attention becaust- 



