504 Mr Gompton, On Right- and Left-Handedness in Barley. 



his statement. Here as in barley there appeared to be no 

 regularity in the arrangement of the two sorts of seeds on the ear. 



V. Inheritance. In the case of the mode of clasping the 

 hands, Lutz* found that the marriages of R.H. by R.H. gave a 

 considerable preponderance of R.H. among the offspring ; those of 

 L.H. by L.H. gave an excess of L.H. children ; while those of R.H. 

 by L.H. gave intermediate ratios. Thus the mode of clasping the 

 hands appears to be inherited in some wayf. 



In the case of the optic chiasma in Teleosts, Larrabee X showed 

 that inheritance of the dimorphic condition cannot be detected 

 either by Mendelian or Galtonian methods. 



With respect to this subject of the inheritance of characters of 

 symmetry it is almost impossible to form an a priori opinion ; 

 and it is an open question which is the more remarkable fact — the 

 inheritance of the mode of clasping the hands or the non-in- 

 heritance of the dimorphism of the optic chiasma. Much more 

 investigation is necessary to determine the essential distinction 

 that produces the different behaviour of the two similar sets of 

 characters. 



The case of barley agrees with that of the optic chiasma in 

 that no inheritance is discernible. This appears to be the con- 

 clusion that must be drawn from the following statistics. 



The seeds produced in 1909 by 36 plants, the twist of whose 

 first leaf was known, were sown in 1910, each ear of grain being 

 treated separately. The following are the tabulated numbers of 

 right- and left-handed first leaves among the seedlings ; all the 

 seedlings produced being included, whether they were borne on 

 the main spike or on " tillers." 



Table IV. (Kinver Chevalier.) 



* Amer. Naturalist, xlii. 1908, p. 195. 



t See Stratton and Compton, " On Accident in Heredity," in the present number 

 of these Proceedings, p. 507. 



J Proc. Amer. Acad, of Arts and Sci. xlii. 1906, no. 12. 



