258 ShuU. 



De Chamissoi) jn 1826 first described this peculiar form of 

 Digitalis and it has been found and noted a number of times since. 

 A specimen sent by l\Ir. Earley to the Gardeners Chronicle was 

 figured and briefly described 2) in 1874. This was said to be a seed- 

 ling of one similarly deformed. In 1882 Henslow*) described spec- 

 imens received by him from Tilburstow Hill, Surrey, England. The 

 same form appeared about 1903 in the Daisy Hill Nursery, Newry, 

 England. In 1905 Mr. T. Smith, the owner of this nursery, sent 

 flowers from the offspring of the original plant to the Gardeners 

 Chronicle with the statement that all the offspring of that plant 

 possessed the same characters as their parent*). In 1910 Professor 

 Dendy showed before the Linnean Society a specimen which he had 

 received from Dr. N. C. MacnamaraS). This plant was also known 

 to be the offspring of a similar plant found in 1907. In 1906 the 

 attention of Miss Saunders was called to a specimen of the heptandra- 

 form which had appeared unexpectedly in the garden of a friend in 

 Cambridge, England, and from unguarded seeds of this plant she has 

 grown two generations which flowered in 1908 and 1910. Both in 

 self-fertilizations and in crosses of Fi plants with the keptaiidra-iorm, 

 Miss Saunders has demonstrated 6) that the latter is a typical Men- 

 delian recessive to the normal type. In 1903 Dr. Tine Tammes found 

 a single individual of heptandra growing in the Botanic Garden of 

 the Rijks-Universiteit at Groningen, Holland, and she, too, has con- 

 ducted crossing experiments which have led her to the same con- 

 clusions regarding the Mendelian behavior of the abnormal form in 

 crosses with normal Digitalis purpurea, but she had not yet published 

 her results when Miss Saunders's paper appeared, and will not now 

 publish. 



Until the appearance of Miss Saunders's account of her 

 experiments, the published evidence as to the inheritance of the 

 heptandra-<^2X^(±&x had been somewhat conflicting. De Chamisso had 



1) Chamisso, A. De, De Digitali purpurea hepiandra. Linnaea 1: 571 — 575, 

 PI. VI, 1826. 



2) Gardeners Chronicle 2: 78. 1874. 



3) Henslow, G., Note on staminiferous corollas of Digitalis purpurea and 

 Solanum tuberosum. Linn. Soc. Journ. Bot. 19; 216 — 218, PI. 33. 1882. 



*) Gardeners Chronicle 36 {3rd Ser.): 208. Fig. 1904. 

 6) Proceedings of Linnean Society for 1910, p. 106. 



6) Saunders, E. R., On inheritance of a mutation in the common foxglove 

 (Digitalis purpurea). The New Phytologist 10: 47 — 63, i PI. 12 Figs. 191 1. 



