LUTHER BURBANk 



about unit characters and the way in which they 

 are blended or mosaiced together to make up the 

 personality of any individual plant. 



It will be recalled that where the two parents 

 of a given individual have opposing qualities as 

 regards a given characteristic — where one, let us 

 say, is black and the other white — ^it is quite the 

 rule for one quality to dominate the other in such 

 a way that the offspring precisely resembles, as 

 regards that quality, the dominant parent — ^in this 

 case the black one — and resembles the other par- 

 ent seemingly not at all. And we have learned 

 also that the latent or recessive character that is 

 thus subordinated — ^in this case whiteness — ^will 

 reappear in a certain proportion of the offspring 

 of the succeeding generation. 



Now, it has been found convenient by recent 

 experimenters to adopt a graphic method that will 

 make the printed accounts of their experiments 

 more readily comprehensible. The expedient in 

 question is the simple one of using a capital letter 

 to designate the dominant factor of any pair of 

 unit characters, and a corresponding lower case 

 or small letter to designate the recessive factor. 



Letting "D," for example, stand for the domi- 

 nant trait of blackness in the illustration just 

 given, and "d" for the recessive trait of white- 

 ness, we may concisely state the facts of inher- 



[74] 



