1921] SCHAFFNER—HEMP 215 
‘writer now has a progeny of young trees from this “male indi-- 
vidual.”” This reversal of the sexual state took place in the meri- 
stematic tissue of the staminate sporophyte. A state which in 
general always causes the expression of male characters through 
some internal cause was changed to a new sexual state or a neutral 
condition by which the sexual expression in the incipient aments 
was easily thrown into the female or the male state, while the rest 
of the tree, consisting of numerous large branches, was in such a 
sexual state that maleness was invariably expressed in the incipient 
aments. This tree functions the same from year to year. All such 
cases, as well as the remarkable behavior of hemp, show that a 
Mendelian hypothesis of sex is at present not only untenable, but 
is absurd in the extreme. It is not even necessary to have such 
a hypothesis as an explanation of sex in the higher animals in which 
the nuclei of the two sexes show an allosome difference. 
I have stated (3) that the great abundance of intermediates 
among the winter hemp plants was probably due to the abnormal 
environment, mainly a lack of light. The statement was also 
made that hemp was ‘‘a dioecious plant which shows sexual dimor- 
phism even in its remote vegetative parts, but numerous individuals 
which are thus specialized have the ability to produce the opposite 
primary sexual generation and sexual cells, without any manipula- 
tion whatever being employed, except that they were grown in an 
unusual environment.’’ It behooves the advocates of the hypoth- 
esis of homozygous and heterozygous constitutions to show how 
their hypothesis works in these numerous examples now on record 
before attempting to confuse biological literature with an apparently 
untenable theory. The present work on hemp shows that the 
attempt to analyze the sexual constitution of monosporangiate or 
bisporangiate plants from ratios which appear in cultures is of 
little value unless it has previously been shown that the plant 
reacts the same to all environments. In any dioecious species 
which has sex intergrades, and there are apparently few which do 
not have them, it is of no genetic importance to discover that a 
certain ‘‘pedigreed”’ individual has produced so many ‘“males,”’ 
“females,” and ‘‘hermaphrodites,” unless it is definitely known 
that the same kind of seeds would not give a different progeny if 
