ABSTRACTS. 347 



FECUNDITY IN THE DOMESTIC FOWL AND THE 

 SELECTION PROBLEM.* 



The purpose of this paper was to answer certain criticisms 

 which had been made of the writer's studies on the inheritance 

 of fecundity and breeding for egg production. Also the paper 

 contains a general discussion of certain theoretical aspects of 

 the selection problem. 



STUDIES ON OAT BREEDING III. ON THE INHERIT- 

 ANCE OF CERTAIN GLUME CHARACTERS IN 

 THE CROSS AVENA FATUA x A. SATIVA var. 

 KHERSON.f 



This paper describes the results obtained from crosses 

 between a wild oat of the species Avena fatua and a cultivated 

 variety known as the Kherson. The object, of this work is to 

 find out how various characters of oats are inherited and this 

 can be done much better when there are a large number of 

 different characters as in the case of these two varieties. 



The characters which were studied were (i) color of the 

 glumes or grain; (2) the wild vs. cultivated character of the 

 base; (3) awns on the grain; and (4) pubescence on various 

 regions of the grain, viz. at the base of the grain, on the pedicel, 

 and on the back of the lower and upper grain of each spikelet. 



The wild parent in this cross has a black glume color, while 

 the Kherson is a yellow oat. The Fi grain is black and in the 

 F= generation, plants with black, gray and yellow grains appear 

 in the proportion of 12 black; 3 gray; 1 yellow. The wild 

 and cultivated character of the base of the grain segregates, 

 giving in the second generation 3 cultivated to 1 wild. The 

 character of the base is entirely independent of the color of the 

 grain. 



The very heavy awns characteristic of the wild oats appear 

 in the progeny only on the grains which have the wild type of 

 base. There are, however, several intermediate types of awn- 



*This is an abstract of a paper by Raymond Pearl, having the same 

 title and published in the American Naturalist, Vol. L, pp. 89-105, 1916. 



tThis is an abstract of a paper by Frank M. Surface having the same 

 title and published in Genetics, Vol. 1, pp. 252-286, 1916. 



