nay melee) AE alae late tT a ee te ees oe a eR Sl Se ae a 
ok eae aay Reece peg 
1885. | and Cross-Breeding of Plants. 1043 
and there were no intermediates between the parents. In this 
case we had the parents of two very distinct types, there being 
scarcely a point of resemblance in general appearance. 
Pea—In 1883 we had crosses between the sugar pea and the 
common pea. The 1884 crop from the crossed seed had the 
seed all of the sugar pea type, the pods all of the common type. 
The wrinkled pea crossed with the smooth pea gave wrinkled and 
smooth peas in the same pod, but no merging of the two forms. 
These facts of careful observation and record are only explain- 
able by the hypothesis that in certain kinds of cross-fertilizations 
and hybridizations the tendency of the crossed seed is to repro- 
duce ancestral forms rather than intermediate forms. That there 
can be a blending of characters in certain cases is well known or 
certainly well asserted; but in the experience gained at the New 
York Agricultural Experiment Station, “sports” or blendings 
are rare in exact accordance with our familiarity with varieties. - 
Thus in the case of the maize, at first we had many cases noted 
in our collection as variables; with the increase of varieties 
grown, and with increased specimens in our museum collection, 
these variables, almost without exception, could be referred to 
types or varieties, and the few exceptions to this statement occur 
in the little-studied class of pod or husk corns. Two illustrations 
will suffice: in New Jersey an excellent farmer there noticed a 
few pod ears in his crop of Blount’s prolific dent and forwarded 
samples to the station as novelties. The seed from these pod 
ears reproduced with us Blount’s prolific of perfect type and pod 
corn of the same type of ear which furnished the seed, and no 
variables from the two types noted. From the crossing of pod 
corn with sweet corn a new variety of sweet corn was produced, 
of a distinct type and esteemed by us a novelty in every respect, 
the cob being fusiform, the kernels horse tooth and much wrin- 
kled, the stalk very small. At a later date this type appeared in 
our collections as the banana sugar, and was proven not to be 
Original with us, 
Darwin, in his Animals and Plants under Domestication, the 
New York edition of 1868, Vol. 11, p. 54, has a section entitled, 
“ Crossing as a direct cause of Reversion,” and says: “ But that 
the act of crossing in itself gives an impulse toward reversion, as 
shown by the reappearance of long-lost characters, has never, I 
believe, been hitherto proved.” His line of evidence, however, 
