The Inheritance of Quantitative Characters in Maize 87 
INHERITANCE OF NUMBER OF STALKS PER PLANT. 
Missouri dent, like most large dent varieties, tillers very little, 
producing as a rule only one tall stalk, or at most two stalks, 
with occasional short tillers. Tom Thumb pop and California 
pop, on the other hand, produce numerous tillers. Tom Thumb 
pop usually has one or two principal stalks with several shorter 
Tillers that end in ears instead of tassels. In the California pop 
most of the numerous tillers have both tassels and ears. In 
recording the data furnished by crosses of these dent and pop 
varieties, an attempt was made to distinguish stalks from tillers, 
but, since the distinction in very many cases was necessarily 
arbitrary, it is deemed best to count every branch from near 
the ground as a stalk without regard to its relative length or 
the presence of a tassel or an ear. Lumping everything in this 
way does not always bring out the real difference between differ 
ent. families. For instance. No. 1145 is shown in Table 36 to 
have contained two plants with four stalks each, whereas, as a 
matter of fact, there was only one plant in the whole lot that had 
as many as two real stalks. The almost universal condition in 
This family, as shown in figure 20, was one tall stalk without any 
Tillers or with one or two very short ones. In family 1146, on 
the other hand, four or five almost equally tall stalks with very 
rarely a short tiller was the prevailing condition. In many cases, 
however, all gradations occurred from tall stalks with ears and 
tassel, tall stalks with tassel but no ear, equally tall stalks end- 
ing in an ear instead of in a tassel, etc., to very short branches 
with neither tassel nor ear. In these cases it was obviously im 
possible to group the various sorts of branches into two definite 
classes. 
The Y x of the cross of Missouri dent and California pop, Table 
35, was intermediate between the parents in number of stalks 
per plant both in 1910 and 1911. The range of variation in 
California pop was greater than in some of the F 2 families. It 
is quite probable that the stock of this variety used was hetero- 
zygous. The F 2 families exhibited more variation than the F x 
families, but only one of them covered the entire range of the 
parents as grown the same year. 
The cross of Missouri dent with Tom Thumb, Table 36. pro- 
duced F^s that were intermediate between the parents and F 2 's 
with a range slightly greater than that of the parents combined. 
That this great variation in F 2 was due to segregation of factors 
for number of stalks per plant is shown by the F 3 families grown 
in 1911. These are arranged in the table according to their mean 
numbers of stalks. Of course, not all of the F 3 's were like the 
F, plants from which they came. The modal class of family 1142 
