No. 548] SHORTER ARTICLES AND DISCUSSION 



tinues : " I have not been able to find time to look up other similar 

 citations to see whether the same inaccuracy applies to them." 

 There are four "similar citations" : one to a paper Dr. Spillman 

 has already read, or at least reviewed for the American Nat- 

 uralist (Vol. 44, p. 761), one to a few lines in the German Zeit- 

 schrift for genetics, one to thirteen lines in the American Nat- 

 uralist (Vol. 45, p. 423) reviewing the fourth, which has again 

 been considered in these pages (Amer. Nat., Vol. 45, pp. 686- 

 700). 



3. Dr. Spillman reiterates: "It is now fairly well established 

 that the norms of a group of related genotypes can, in some cases 

 at least, be arranged in a frequency curve." Thus, he tells us, 

 genotypic differences fall under de Vries's category of fluctu- 

 ating variation, while in discontinuous variation "the norms can 

 not be thus arranged." 



Personally, I have not the slightest prejudice against these 

 conclusions, but I can not accept them without proof. Dr. Spill- 

 man cites none. So far as I have been able to ascertain there is 

 not a single series of trustworthy quantitative data in support 

 of these pregnant generalizations. 



4. I acknowledge my fault in omitting homozygous. This was 

 a serious blunder on my part ! By including it, one can always 

 reason in a circle and to prove his preconceptions assume that 



the original ancestors of a line were or were not homozygous, 

 according to the outcome of his experiments. This is the loop- 

 hole through which the supple genotypist can always crawl when 

 the evidence on the other side gets a little too strong. Again, in 

 the genotypic ritual, "I wish to publicly repent." 



5. But is not the reviewer a little over-zealous when he con- 

 tinues, "the definition is further inaccurate in including clonal 

 varieties under the definition of genotype"? In doing this I 

 merely followed the example of the best specialists. My paper 



terminology, as I believe i 



. facts, 



t went to press. Several months after the paper Dr. Spillman 

 s criticizing appeared, changes in terminology were forced by 

 'the dictator of the whilom orthodox" genotypic "school"! 



J. Arthur Harris 



