ON THE CORRELATION BETWEEN SOMATIC CHARACTERS 
AND FERTILITY : ILLUSTRATIONS FROM THE INVO- 
LUCRAL WHORL OF HIBISCUS. 
By J. ARTHUR HARRIS, Ph.D., Carnegie Institution of Washington, U.S.A. 
Introductory. 
In several places* Pearson has pointed out the importance of knowing whether 
fertility be correlated with somatic characters. Recently f he sums up his experi- 
ence of this matter as follows : 
" I should be surprised to find a large inheritance of fertility now, just as I 
should be surprised not to find a large inheritance of any somatic character. And 
on the evidence we have at present, I should not expect to find a correlation 
between fertility and a somatic character ; if it does exist in any case, I should 
anticipate very rapid changes going on in that species." 
One of the phases of the investigations of fertility and fecundity in plants 
which have occupied me for the past several years is the relationship between the 
somatic characters and fertility and fecundity. The time now seems ripe to 
present the results of certain limited phases of this work. I select for the present 
paper results of studies on the involucral whorl of Malvaceous genus Hibiscus. 
At the outset I must confess that I took up the work with a prejudice in favor 
of a sensible relationship between the number of bracts and the fertility of the 
fruit. The intimate spatial association of the involucral whorl and the carpellary 
whorl seemed justification enough for this hypothesis. Furthermore I believe 
botanists generally would have concurred in this opinion. Certain it is that BaurJ 
writes with confidence of the factors producing a chance variation curve in the size 
of the bean seed, and includes number of pods and number of assimilating leaves 
on the branch among them, although no weighings are given in substantiation. 
One of the most prominent European botanists intimated to me that a correlation 
* For instance Proc. Roy. Soc. Vol. lxix. p. 301 ; Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. Vol. cxcn. p. 258. 
t Biometrika, Vol. vn. pp. 369—370, 1910. 
% Baur, E. : Ber. Deutsch. Bot. Ges. Vol. xxv. pp. 444—446, 1910. 
