It will be remembered that the condition I 

 assumed for these hybrid beans was used to 

 bring into harmony with simple Mendelian 

 hybrids the apparently anomalous results of 

 Tschermak, Emerson, Lock, Bateson, Correns, 

 Cuenot and Castle. The prediction that the 

 same conception of latent characters in the 

 sense of invisible , not inactive ones would 

 without doubt give a solution to the intricate 

 and otherwise apparently inexplicable behavior 

 of stocks and sweet-peas, as studied by Bate- 

 son, was fulfilled with unexpected promptness, 

 as the third report 2 to the Evolution Commit- 

 tee presented in March, 1906, and published 

 later in the same year, adopts the same theory 

 and shows that in this way practically all of 

 the apparent anomalies of stocks and sweet- 

 peas may be explained upon the simple basis 

 of typical Mendelian behavior without re- 

 course to the hypallelomorphs or compound 

 units earlier assumed by Bateson. 



This complete demonstration that latent 

 characters, at least in many cases, are not 

 inactive units that may be rendered active by 

 some unknown influence, but are, instead, 

 units that produce a visible character only 

 when acting in conjunction with one or more 

 other units, justifies me in calling attention 

 again to the significances of such characters. 



In order to see the bearing of these results 

 upon the process of evolution it is necessary 

 to realize that what we call a unit character 

 is not necessarily produced by the activity of 

 a single allelomorph, and I consider it prob- 

 able that few visible characters are so pro- 

 duced. It makes no difference how many 

 internal units are involved in the production of 

 any so-called unit-character, so long as there 



a Bateson, W., Saunders, Miss E. R., Punnett, 

 R. C., 'Experimental Studies in the Physiology 

 of Heredity,' Reports to the Evolution Committee 

 of the Royal Society, Report III., 53 pp., London, 

 1906. 



