346 BOTANICAL GAZETTE [NOVEMBER 



mother as well as the father. On this account the cross between 

 hermaphrodites and males must be considered the most important 

 of all combinations in interpreting the relations of the sexes. The 

 difficulty involved in the castration of the flowers permits the 

 question whether the two hermaphrodites may not have been due 

 to a faulty technique, for males produced from unintentional self- 

 pollinations would be hermaphrodites. 3 Special efforts were put 

 forth in 1909 to secure more crosses of this character, but these 

 resulted in a single success, and that of so limited extent as to be 

 wholly indecisive. The 9 offspring of this cross (09215) consisted 

 of 8 females and i male, so that the little evidence which such a 

 small family can give is in harmony with the proposition that the 

 character of the female parent has no influence upon the sex char- 

 acters of the male offspring, except possibly by supplying an intra- 

 cellular environment which is favorable or unfavorable to the occur- 

 rence of sex Imitation, suggested under case V. Continued efforts 

 are being made to secure more data from combinations of hermaph- 

 rodites with normal males. 



CASE IX 



WHEN HERMAPHRODITE OFFSPRING OF A HERMAPHRODITE MOTHER AND NORMAL 

 MALE FATHER ARE CROSSED UPON AN UNRELATED FEMALE 



The appearance of 2 hermaphrodites in family 08116 of case 

 VIII immediately raised the question whether they were true 

 genetic hermaphrodites like A and B, or whether they might not 

 be somatic hermaphrodites whose hermaphrodite character was not 

 in any way related to the fact that they were the offspring of a 

 hermaphrodite seed parent. If they should prove to be somatic 



4 In a family grown in 1911 from a cross between a white-flowered hermaphro- 

 dite and a homozygous blue-flowered male, all the offspring were blue-flowered and 

 several (less than 6 per cent) were hermaphrodite, thus showing that such hermaph- 

 rodites are not in this instance due to any unintentional self-fertilization. 



