552 Length of the Fruit in Oenothera Laniarckiana. 



plants without any attention being paid to their fruit- 

 length; in 1891 however the plants with short fruits 

 were weeded out before they ripened their seed. The 

 seeds of the remainder were mixed and sown in wooden 

 boxes, in February, in the greenhouse belonging to my 

 laboratory. As soon as the cotyledons were fully un- 

 folded a number were planted out singly in pots of 9-10 

 centimeters in diameter without any regard to differ- 

 ences in development (which as a matter of fact at this 

 stage are scarcely appreciable). The soil was a good leaf 

 mould, to every litre of which was added 10 grammes 

 of dry powdered cow manure and 10 grammes of horn 

 flour, a very strong dressing which I have used with the 

 best results for producing contortions, fasciations and 

 other structural abnormalities.^ The young plants were 

 at first kept under glass until the rosettes were very 

 strong and had begun to develop a stem. At the end 

 of May they were planted out in my experimental garden 

 in a bed far removed from the other cultures. As in 

 the latter the plants were deprived of all their lateral 

 branches, so that they flowered only on the main stem. 



Thanks, doubtless, to the early sowing and to accel- 

 erated early growth this culture flowered some weeks 

 earlier than the others; they also ripened their fruits 

 considerably earlier. I had altogether 22 plants whose 

 seeds were harvested separately. Of these I chose five 

 for next year's sowing after harvesting time was well 

 past, and the fruits were no longer at hand. In this way 

 no regard could be paid to the fruit-length of the seed- 

 parents which had not even been measured. 



Next year (1893) the seed was sown in the middle 



^ Eine Methode Zwangsdrehungen aufstisucken; Ber. d. d. bot. 

 Gesellsch., Bd. XII, 1894, P- 25. 



