362 BOTANICAL GAZETTE [NOVEMBER 
and carry only the female tendency, while its sperm cells are of two 
types, one of which has the same sex character as the egg cells, 
the other bearing the hermaphrodite condition. In my preliminary 
paper, it was suggested that those eggs may fail to develop which 
lack the female gene F, or which possess the male gene M; or that 
in case the female is a negative homozygote, there might be an 
extrusion of the male gene during oogenesis. As there are no 
visible cytological differences between the females and the hermaph- 
rodites, it may not be possible to decide these questions. The 
relatively small number of seeds in the hermaphrodites, as com- 
pared with the females, appears to be favorable to a selective elim- 
ination of male-bearing eggs. Another explanation seems possible. 
A segregation of the female and male genes may conceivably take 
place earlier than the time at which the germ cells are formed, 
though it must be admitted that there is little evidence at present 
that such early segregations regularly take place in any plant or 
animal. Such a suggestion has been made by BATESON (2, P. 159); 
however, in the effort to account for certain interesting instances 
of coupling. If a segregation of female and hermaphrodite genes 
could be assumed to take place as early as the formation of a certain 
primordial cell from which the entire reproductive tissue of the 
ovary develops, so that the ovules are supplied only with the female 
genes, the observed uniformity of the egg cells would result. If 
segregation may take place thus before the spermacytes are devel- 
oped, this might also offer an explanation of the exceedingly variable 
sex ratios which occur in Lychnis, for an unequally rapid develop- 
ment of tissues derived from female-bearing cells and male-bearing 
cells, from the moment of segregation until the spermacytes are 
produced, would give an unequal number of female-bearing and 
male-bearing sperms, and variability in this process would produce 
irregular ratios. I place no stress upon this hypothesis, howevet; 
and am inclined to look for an explanation of the observed phenom- 
ena in some sort of selective elimination. 
There remains to be considered the relation of the somatic 
hermaphrodites to the problems of sex determination. The 
results under cases XIII and XIV show that the hermaphrodite 
* They are known to take place occasionally in the production of bud sports: 
