No. 594] SHORTER ARTICLES AND DISCUSSION 



371 



his selection were found, according to the author, growing near 

 the edge of a road that was covered with grass. He does not tell 

 us the exact composition of all the leaves of these two plants with 

 which he started, but states that they bore several tetramerous 

 and one pentamerous leaf. Neither of the plants, therefore, 

 could be called mutants of a new race, but were mutating forms 

 from which De Vries obtained, after a process of most rigid se- 

 lection, his highly variable race, Tri folium pratense quinque- 

 folium. 



During the spring of 1914, I found growing in an old orchard 

 at Corvallis, Oregon, a red clover plant that showed "full- 

 fledged" all the characters of Tri folium pratense quinquefolium 

 about which De Vries has written, and which took him so long 

 to obtain by the aid of selection. This clover plant, after careful 

 examination, was transplanted in one of my experimental plots 

 for further study. The following descriptive notes of it are 

 given: Of medium height; good color; normal as to vigor, but 

 not luxuriant; seven stalks; leaves, 4 trimerous, 5 tetramerous, 

 12 pentamerous; total number of leaves, 21. Not only did the 

 pentamerous condition of so many leaves represent the mode for 

 leaf variation, but there were more five-leaved leaves than both 

 four-leaved and three-leaved leaves combined. 



The magnitude of this mutation may be more fully appreciated 

 when we reflect that De Vries, after selecting for three genera- 

 tions and obtaining 300 plants, found only one that gave as high 

 a percentage as 36 for both tetra- and pentamerous leaves ; while 

 the percentage of tetra- and pentamerous leaves for all those 

 counted, 8,366, was only 14. 



After finding this specimen of Trifolium pratense quinque- 

 folium I was exceedingly desirous of obtaining another plant 

 with which to cross fertilize it so as to obtain a race which could 

 be used commercially, but repeated searches made for many days 

 failed to reveal any other plant suitable to cross with this one. 

 Thus failing to find a second plant, I decided to propagate the 

 discovered mutant vegetatively. This method gave some degree 

 of success, and a few plants were reared during the summer of 

 1914 from slips. When I left Oregon at the end of the summer, 

 four of these plants were transferred to a private lot, and a rail- 

 ing, supported by stakes, was put around them. 



Examination on June 3 the following summer (1915) showed 

 two of these slips doing well, one had been trampled on and 



