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THE AMERICAN NATURALIST [Vol. XLIII 



thread in fertilization, then, must unite end to end to form one of 

 double length. While Meves ascribes a large part in the trans- 

 portation of hereditary qualities to the chondriosomes, he does 

 not claim that they alone, to the exclusion of the nucleus, carry 

 these qualities. He thinks that both nucleus and cytoplasm 

 work together, the qualities of the nucleus being carried by the 

 chromosomes, those of the cytoplasm by the chondriosomes. 



F. Payne. 



Cultural Bed-Mutations in the Potato E. Heckel 1 has reared 



the white-flowered Solatium maglia from tubers received from 

 Sutton and from Vilmoyin. The young plants resembled per- 

 fectly typical S. maglia. They were transplanted from the 

 greenhouse to a fertile garden where common potatoes had been 

 grown the year previously. The tubers obtained differed 

 greatly from those planted and those characteristic of this 

 species. They weighed from ten to twenty times as much. One 

 in particular weighed 135 grams; the flesh instead of being 

 watery and slightly bitter as it typically is, was compact and 

 full of starch — the tuber was edible. This tuber being planted 

 gave, the next year, five tubers from 87 to 62 grams in weight. 

 The other tubers (of smaller size) yielded tubers of from 50 

 to 5 grams — the smallest having the size of the typical tubers 

 of S. maglia. The author refers to the large potato obtained 

 by him from S. maglia as a mutation, but suspects that its size 

 may have been influenced by the previous growth in the same 

 soil of the common tubers. 



1 Ann. des Faculte des Sci. Marseille, XVI, 1907. 



