THE ROYAL WALNUT 



It appears to me, however, that these dwarfed 

 southern forms are only varieties that have 

 acquired different characteristics through the 

 influence of what for them has proved an unfa- 

 vorable environment. In any event there is no 

 reason to doubt that the dwarf form and the 

 relatively large one are descended from the same 

 original stock, though doubtless divergence has 

 gone on through numberless generations. 



Meantime the English or Persian walnut, the 

 other parent of the Paradox, is also a variable 

 tree. In its native home it is very small, and even 

 the cultivated variety cannot be depended upon 

 to reproduce a given racial strain when grown 

 from the seed. 



It is obvious, then, that the tendency to dwarf- 

 ness, which appears in such conspicuous fashion 

 in some of our second generation hybrids, may be 

 accounted for as reversion to dwarfed ancestral 

 strains in both parents in the case of the Paradox 

 and of one parent in the case of the Royal. 



The tendency to grow relatively large prevailed 

 in the strains of walnuts that were used in my 

 hybridizing experiments, and the prepotency or 

 dominance of this tendency is clearly shown in 

 the hybrids of the first filial generation. But the 

 latent tendency to dwarfness, which in the Men- 

 delian phraseology would be termed a recessive 



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