794 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XVI. No. 414. 



George A. Dorsey, of the Field Columbian Mu- 

 seum, will preside over Section H, Anthropol- 

 ogy- 



You are cordially invited to be present at 

 this meeting, and to contribute papers on 

 topics connected with your field of research. 

 It is to be hoped that at this first meeting of 

 the Association under the new rules Section 

 H may make an effort to set even a higher 

 standard of excellence and secure a greater 

 wealth of material of interest from its mem- 

 bers than at any of its previous winter meet- 

 ings. Field work has been carried on with 

 almost unprecedented vigor during the last 

 year, and it is hoped that the results may be 

 freely offered to the Section. 



It is desirable that a preliminary program 

 be distributed in advance of the meeting, and 

 in order to render this possible, titles of papers 

 should be sent to the secretary as early as 

 possible. Abstracts of papers, or the papers 

 themselves, may be sent later at the aiithor's 

 convenience, whose attention is called to the 

 fact that no title will appear in the final pro- 

 gram until the paper, either in full or in ab- 

 stract, has been passed upon by the sectional 

 committee. Eoland B. Dixon, 



Secretary Section R. 



Habvaed Univeesity, CAMBKmGE, Mass. 

 November 1, 1902. 



SHORTER ARTICLES. 

 EXCEPTIONS TO Mendel's law. 

 In a former paper on ' Quantitative Studies 

 on the Transmission of Parental Characters 

 to Hybrid Offspring,'* I presented data in 

 support of the provisionally stated law that, 

 ' in the second generation of hybrids of sim- 

 ilar breeding (with close fertilization) the 

 same types tend to occur, and in definite pro- 

 portions; two of these types are like the 

 parents, the others include all possible inter- 

 mediate forms.' t At the time that paper was 

 prepared the writer was not aware that others 

 had published anything on the same subject. 

 We now know that Mendel, De Vries, Cor- 

 rens and Bateson have shown that the same 



* Bui. 115, Off. Ex. Sta., U. S. Dept. Agric, pp. 

 88-98. 



t L. c, p. 93. 



law applies to the third and later generations. 

 With this extension, and with a slight altera- 

 tion of the second clause to be noticed below, 

 the above statement accords with Mendel's 

 original statement of the law he discovered. 

 It happened that in all my hybrids certain 

 characters obeyed a law different from Men- 

 del's, hence the form in which the second 

 clause of the law is stated above. The data 

 in my original paper were arranged to illus- 

 trate the law as stated. That certain charac- 

 ters did obey Mendel's law may be easily 

 shown by rearranging the data with reference 

 to that law. In five out of fourteen crosses 

 between varieties of wheat, one parent was 

 bearded, the other smooth. In all these cases 

 beards were recessive. Mendel's law would, 

 therefore, call for 25 per cent, of bearded 

 plants in the second generation of the hybrid. 

 The actual results obtained were as follows: 



Male. 

 Valley. 



Female. 

 Little Club. 



Plat No. 

 C 16 

 C18 

 C21 



Per cent. 



Bearded Plants. 



14.0 



27.2 



35.9 



Average, 25.7 



Little Club. Emporium. 



F26 

 F30 

 F31 

 F32 

 G 1 

 G 2 



Average, 



23.2 

 30.0 

 22.7 

 28.0 

 19.2 

 24.0 

 24^ 



Lebis'h. 



Red Chaff. 



F13 21.5 



F 15 30.3 



F17 26.0 



Average, 25.9 



Little Club. 



Valley. 



J 6 

 J 7 

 119 

 J 3 

 J 4 

 J 8 

 J 9 

 J 10 

 J 12 

 J 13 

 J 14 



Average, 



23.9 

 24.1 

 17.6 

 26.2 

 25.3 

 26.4 

 23.4 

 24.9 

 41.6 

 19.6 

 24.3 

 25^2 



This last cross is the reciprocal of the first. 



