I24 BOTANICAL GAZETTE [FEBRUARY 
These results agree in a general way with those of Bryonia in that 
they demonstrate the homozygous character of the females and the 
heterozygous character of the males in Lychnis. 
Whether the females are positive or negative homozygotes cannot 
be determined from the F,, as both assumptions can be made to fit 
the facts by the aid of simple correlative hypotheses whose correctness 
or incorrectness can be determined only by further breeding. 
A fundamental difficulty in either case is found in the fact that the 
egg cells of the hermaphrodites are apparently of a single type, all 
possessing the female-producing gene. The assumption that the 
hermaphrodites are heterozygous leads us to expect equal numbers 
of two different types of egg cells. Cytological studies may perhaps 
explain this difficulty. The male germ cells of the same plants are 
of two types, as required by theory. 
The occurrence of two hermaphrodite individuals in a progeny 
produced by a cross between hermaphrodite and normal male sug- 
gests the possibility that the hermaphrodite character may also be 
transmitted through the female. This fact, together with the occur- 
rence of two genotypes among the hermaphrodites, is held to be 
slightly favorable to the view that the female is a positive homozygote. 
The demonstration that the hermaphrodite individuals of Lychnis 
are modified males indicates that STRASBURGER was mistaken in 
assuming that his hermaphrodites were diseased females. They were 
probably diseased males in which the dominance of the male character 
_ was modified by the fungus. : 
The sex ratios in Lychnis do not accord well with a theory of sex 
which requires males and females to be present in equal numbers. 
The ratios found in my cultures are in accord with those found by 
STRASBURGER, the average for the past year being 1.32 females to 
1 male, with a very wide difference in the ratios of different families. 
The significance of these ratios is not yet understood. 
When the variability in the sex ratios is compared with that in 
ratios produced by crossing heterozygous purple with white-flowered 
individuals, it is found that not only is there an undue departure in 
the sex ratios from the expected ratio 1:1, but also that there is greatet 
variability in the sex ratios than in the color ratios, and that the curve 
is strongly negatively skewed and possibly not monomodal; while the. 
