HOWARD AND HOWARD. 15 
west and from south to north. Raum! at Munich found that the 
North German and exotic varieties became more and more flinty 
each year and tended to resemble the flinty Bavarian wheats. The 
consistency of the exotic kinds was also found to be influenced by 
season toa much greater extent than that of the local wheats. 
At Pusa, Leather has found in pot cultures of one of the Bengal 
macaroni wheats, that the addition of superphosphate and oil cake 
to the local soil alters the proportion of nitrogen to starch. 
Our attention was drawn to this question during the harvest 
of 1906 in the Punjab. We found that in numerous cases, especially 
in the so-called soft white wheats, ears could be found which contain- 
ed soft, hard and spotted grains. Similar observations were made 
in 1907 and 1908 both at Pusa and Lyallpur, and in the case of 
numerous samples of ears sent to us from other parts of India. We 
found in the case of pure culture wheats from single ears that both 
at Lyallpur and at Pusa soft wheats tend to become flinty. The 
reverse change from hard to soft is rarer, but is to be met with in 
macaroni wheats, e.g., Punjab types1 and 2, and the Bengal durum 
wheats at Pusa. Avery large number of our Punjab white wheats 
at Lyallpur in 1908 showed hard, soft and spotted grains. There 
was no question of admixture, as the original selection from one ear 
in 1906 was made by us as well as all the subsequent sowings and 
harvestings and the samples were kept in safe custody. Our 
general experience has been that hard wheats do not change in con- 
sistency so easily as soft wheats. Both at Pusa and Lyallpur we 
have obtained samples differmg in consistency from the same 
variety grown the same year in different fields or on slightly different 
soils. In 1908, with largecultures of selected Muzaffarnagar wheat, 
obtained the previous year from Muzaffarnagar, at both Pusa and 
Lyallpur the grain was more flinty than the original and also gave 
a higher nitrogen content on analysis. We conclude, therefore, with 
Eriksson, Koernicke and Fruwirth that consistency 1s useless as a 
varietal character and that it depends on the environment. We 
! Raum, Zur Kenntnis der morphologischen Verdnderungen der Getreidehkirner unter 
dem Einflusse klimatischer Verhdltnisse, Munich, 1906, 
