LUTHER BURBANK 
about unit characters and the way in which they 
are blended or mosaiced together to make up the 
personality of any individual plant. 
It will be recalled that where the two parents 
of a given individual have opposing qualities as 
regards a given characteristic—where one, let us 
say, is black and the other white—it is quite the 
rule for one quality to dominate the other in such 
a way that the offspring precisely resembles, as 
regards that quality, the dominant parent—in this 
case the black one—and resembles the other par- 
ent seemingly not at all. And we have learned 
also that the latent or recessive character that is 
thus subordinated—in this case whiteness—will 
reappear in a certain proportion of the offspring 
of the succeeding generation. 
Now, it has been found convenient by recent 
experimenters to adopt a graphic method that will 
make the printed accounts of their experiments 
more readily comprehensible. The expedient in 
question is the simple one of using a capital letter 
to designate the dominant factor of any pair of 
unit characters, and a corresponding lower case 
or small letter to designate the recessive factor. 
Letting “D,” for example, stand for the domi- 
nant trait of blackness in the illustration just 
given, and “d” for the recessive trait of white- 
ness, we may concisely state the facts of inher- 
[74] 
