Agronomy and Horticulture Department


Date of this Version



The American Naturalist, Vol. 47, No. 562 (Oct., 1913), pp. 633-636


Copyright 1913 R. A. Emerson.


In another paper on the inheritance of a recurring somatic variation in variegated ears of maize, it was shown that the amount of red color developed in the pericarp of variegated seeds bears a definite relation to the development of color in the progeny of such seeds. The relation is such that the more color there is in the pericarp of the seeds planted the more likely are they to produce plants with wholly self-red ears and correspondingly the less likely to produce plants with variegated ears. Self-red ears thus produced behave just as if they were hybrids between self-red and variegated races or self-red and white races, the behavior in any given case depending upon whether the parent variegated ears were homnozygous or heterozygous for variegated pericarp and whether they were self-pollinated or crossed with white.