394 
Journal of Agricultural Research 
Vol. IX, No. ii 
to the plants homozygous for the recessive ramosa character and either 
homozygous or heterozygous for the dominant tunicate character. 
The intimate relation between the ramosa characters and the cauli¬ 
flower type of inflorescence may have a bearing on the appearance of 
cauliflower in Blaringhem’s strain of Z. tunicata. If the two abnormali¬ 
ties are really of the same nature, the possibility is suggested that in 
Blaringhem’s strain there was a re-occurrence of the ramosa mutation. 
Blaringhem had but few plants of this strain under observation; hence, 
the absence of pure ramosa plants would not be remarkable. In the 
course of our experiments hundreds of plants of Z. tunicata have been 
examined and their abnormalities studied, but nothing resembling the 
cauliflower type of inflorescence has been found. In the hybrid under 
discussion, cauliflower is more definitely associated with the ramosa than 
with the tunicata characters. The phenomenon itself appears as an 
accentuation of the branched habit, and while plants with cauliflower 
ears occurred without exhibiting tunicata characters in the tassel, the 
ramosa characters are in all instances fully expressed. 
In making this cross between these two variations from normal maize, 
each of which may be looked upon as a reversion, the hope was enter¬ 
tained that their combination might bring to light still other ancestral 
characters and help to give us a slightly more definite conception of the 
ancestors of maize. In this hope of securing direct evidence we were 
disappointed. When the two characters are forced to come into expres¬ 
sion in the same individual, the result is either a mixture of the two 
characters or a sterile monstrosity which by no stretch of the imagination 
can be regarded as an ancestral condition. 
Ftom the fact that Z. tunicata is a dominant variation Blaringhem (1907) 
concludes that it is a new or progressive mutation without significance 
in the study of the ancestry of maize. Since in every particular by 
which Z. tunicata departs from normal maize, it does so by replacing the 
specialized characters of maize with characters common to practically 
all other grasses, to place so much emphasis on the dominance of the 
character seems unreasonable. 
The phylogenetic bearing of Z. ramosa is less obvious, but even here 
it seems not unwarranted to consider the variation in the nature of a 
reversion. The partial incompatibility of the two variations may be 
explained on the assumption that they represent the recurrence of char¬ 
acters from two widely separated ancestors. 
SUMMARY 
Z. ramosa and Z. tunicata are looked upon as mutative reversions, the 
one recessive, the other dominant, as compared with normal maize. 
The result of crossing these two mutants has been to show that both 
behave as independent Mendelian units. In the second generation there 
appears (1) normal maize showing none of the characters of either muta- 
