which are like those they have written down in books as the 
proper characters for tobacco plants. And round stems, crowned 
with flowers with five petals, five stamens, and two ovary-locules 
are some of these proper characters. So the monstrous strain was 
mated to a little bushy branched variety which had these char- 
acters proper to normals, but which differed from the normal 
ancestor of the monstrous strain in leaf-shape, size, and number; 
in flower color, in height, in being branched and in many other 
characters. This mating at first resulted in no particular sur- 
prises, for the offspring were monotonous in their similarity and 
each resembled the little bushy parent except in being slightly 
taller and in displaying a few flowers on each plant with an extra 
floral part or two added to each whorl. But when guarded seed 
from any one of these was planted, the resulting offpring were as 
strikingly diverse as the population of Ellis Island or a New York 
school ground. Hundreds of progeny were grown but among 
them were to be found no duplicates. Classification on the basis 
of resemblance to parent, or to either grandparent was out of the 
question. Every plant, like the products of the Paris salons, 
seemed to be a special creation. The gatherings at Babel could 
not have boasted of more striking diversities. There were plants 
short, medium and tall; plants with broad flat stems, narrow flat 
stems, square stems, round stems, and branched stems; plants 
with stems like a base-ball bat, and stems like a hockey stick, 
stems with a hundred or more irregularly placed leaves and stems 
comparatively bare of leaves. There were plants with flowers red 
and with flowers pink, with normal flowers, slightly abnormal 
flowers and very abnormal flowers. Plants with great massive 
flower heads, with their individual flowers packed together like 
people in a street mob, grew beside little plants with small, loose, 
floral crowns. Tall, broad-leaved, round-stemmed individuals 
grew beside and cut off the light from their short, thick-set, flat- 
stemmed sisters. And last and most curious of all were plants 
which were meant to be tall, but owing to their abnormal ancestry, 
they grew a foot or two and curled up their stems, after the mail- 
er of the capitals of an Ionic column (see fig. 5). Such a result 
from crossing the monstrous strain with a normal strain made 
one feel dubious regarding the operation of any law, especially 
when such a motley array were the offspring of a single plant. 
One’s attempts to classify this progeny by disregarding all the 
other characters except those traceable to the monstrous grand- 
parent were practically futile, because the characters of this mon- 
strous ancestor were apparently inherited separately and not 
as though they were all tied together, as in the cross be- 
tween the monstrous strain and its normal ancestor. There ap- 
peared to be every gradation of the abnormal character expressed, 
some plants resembling the monstrous grandparent, others mon- 
