582 Mutations 



But it seems probable, and is especially proved 

 in the case of the evening-primroses, that all 

 or the majority of the representatives of the 

 whole strain have the same tendency to mutate. 

 If this were a general rule, it would suffice to 

 take some pure seeds from specimens of the 

 presumed parents and to sow and multiply the 

 individuals to such an extent that the mutation 

 might have a chance to be repeated. 



Unfortunately, this has not as yet been done, 

 but in my opinion it should be the first effort of 

 any one who has the good luck to discover a new 

 wild mutation. Specimens of the parents 

 should be transplanted into a garden and fertil- 

 ized under isolated conditions. Seeds saved 

 from the wild plant would have little worth, as 

 they might have been partly fertilized by the 

 new type itself. 



After this somewhat lengthy discussion of the 

 value of observations surrounding the discovery 

 of new wild mutations, we now come to the de- 

 scription of some of the more interesting cases. 

 As a first example, I will take the globular- 

 fruited shepherd's purse, described by Solms- 

 Laubach as Capsella heegeri. Professor 

 Heeger discovered one plant with deviating 

 fruits, in a group of common shepherd's purses 

 in the market-place near Landau in Germany, 

 in the fall of 1897. They were nearly spher- 



