ON PEAS AND BEANS 



black pods and the beans within them were as 

 black as ink. 



Yet one of the parent beans had produced a 

 crimson pod with a red seed, and the other a crim- 

 son and white striped pod, with red and white 

 striped seed. 



Here, it will be seen, there was no such sharp 

 differentiation of the color-factors for pod or seed 

 into opposing pairs, with dominance in one and 

 recessiveness in the other, as was shown by the 

 peas in Mendel's experiments. On the contrary, 

 the union of red beans with red and white striped 

 ones produced something totally unlike either — 

 namely, a jet black bean. 



But in the succeeding generation the offspring 

 of the black bean showed a breaking up into new 

 groups of characters suggestive of Mendelian 

 heredity. Some of them were black, some red, 

 some speckled, and some white. There were cor- 

 responding variations also as to size and shape of 

 the beans, some being large and some small, some 

 round and some flat. And there was marked 

 diversity in time of ripening. 



As to the vines themselves, the original hybrid 

 showed the enhanced vitality that commonly char- 

 acterizes the offspring of rather widely separated 

 parents. The original first-generation vine (which 

 bore the black beans) grew enormous, outstripping 



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