REVIEWS. 
1 1 3 
stripes never being wholly bridged over. The fed type springs annually 
from the striped variety, and annually reverts to it, both through seeds 
and buds. This is sporting in the ordinary use of the term. Evidently 
the striped character must have been latent in the monochromatic form, 
but the latency is of a different type from that in Mendelian hybrids. 
Five-leaved clovers show reversion to the more characteristic pinnate 
leaf of papillionaceous plants. They are distinct in nature from the four¬ 
leaved clovers, which usually are due merely to a splitting of one of the 
three leaflets of the ordinary type leaf. When a plant is poor in a variety, 
e. g., only one or two four-leaved clovers on one individual plant, the 
anomaly is termed a half-race. 
Pistillody in Poppies. —Pistillody, or the conversion of stamens into pis¬ 
tils, is often met with in poppies, the wall-flower (C heir ant hus Cheiri ), 
the houseleek (Sempervivum tectorum), and other plants. Ovules borne 
by the altered organs mature good seed after fertilization, and plants from 
such seed inherit the anomaly of the parents, thus proving the heredita¬ 
bility of the peculiarity. Experiments show that the quality is possessed 
by distinct races only, and the cultivation of large numbers of the ordi¬ 
nary plants, in the hope of securing the anomaly, is useless. “ Often 
pedigree-experiments lead to poor races, betraying their tendency to devi¬ 
ate only from time to time and in rare cases.” These are the “ half¬ 
races ” already defined, as distinguished from the corresponding ever- 
sporting varieties, which sport in nearly every generation. The ever- 
sporting variety of the poppy has been cultivated for over half a century, 
and characteristically “ fluctuates around an average type with half-filled 
crowns, going as far as possible in both directions, but never transgress¬ 
ing either limit.” The degree of development of the anomaly varies di¬ 
rectly with the individual strength of the plant, and therefore is affected 
by external conditions' (especially amount of nourishment) from the time 
of fertilization onward. 
But “ no selection is adequate to produce either a pure strain or brightly 
crowned flower-heads without atavism, or to conduce to an absolute and 
permanent loss of the anomaly. . . . Limits are soon reached on both 
sides, and to transgress these seems impossible. Taking these limits as 
the mark of the variety, and considering all fluctuations between them as 
responses to external influences working during the life of the individual 
or governing the ripening of the seeds, we get a clear picture of a per¬ 
manent ever-sporting type.” 
From the morphological standpoint monstrosities are accidents, but not 
so from the point of view of physiology. They even show that some 
hereditary quality, previously latent, has become active in response to 
external conditions. Here, also, under the same environment we may 
have poor races and rich ones, but each case has its limits, which are 
never transgressed through 'the influence of external conditions. All 
efforts so far experimentally to change a poor race into a rich one have 
failed, though the belief is expressed that “some time a method will be 
discovered of arbitrarily producing such conversions.” 
