Polycephalic Poppies 399 



no selection is adequate to produce either a pure 

 strain of brightly crowned flower-heads without 

 atavism, or to conduce to an absolute and per- 

 manent loss of the anomaly. During a series of 

 years I have tested my plants in both directions, 

 but without the least effect. Limits are soon 

 reached on both sides, and to transgress these 

 seems quite impossible. 



Taking these limits as the marks of the 

 variety, and considering all fluctuations between 

 them as responses to external influences work- 

 ing during the life of the individual or govern- 

 ing the ripening of the seeds, we get a clear pic- 

 ture of a permanent ever-sporting type. The 

 limits are absolutely permanent during the 

 whole existence of this already old variety. 

 They never change. But they include so wide a 

 range of variability that the extremes may be 

 said to grade into one another, so much the more 

 so as one of the extremes is to be considered 

 morphologically as the type of the variation, 

 while the other extreme can hardly be distin- 

 guished from the normal form of the species. 



