Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/162

156 showing that the initial step towards atavic change took place in the germ cell of every one of the first seeds produced on those southern soils, and that the reversion was therefore sudden and aggregate. Mr. Browne, who has business interests in Calapach island, which lies thirty miles east of the Isle of Pines and eighty miles south of Cuba, also informs me that there are now growing on that island tomato plants which are four or five years old, they having changed from the condition of annual, to that of perennial plants in that tropical climate. Furthermore, the fruit of those plants has changed from a good variety of large size for the first fruitage to the cherry form and size before mentioned for the later fruitages.

These credible facts, gathered from widely different sources, plainly indicate that various exciting causes of varietal fruit degeneration exist, but they throw little light upon the real nature of those causes. The facts mentioned also indicate that many new opportunities are likely to arise for scientific agricultural experimentation with the tomato. Our tropical and subtropical island possessions will doubtless soon be called upon to supply, for our own and other countries, the increasing demand for early tomatoes, just as northern Egypt has been made the early tomato garden of Europe. My present object in referring to these facts, however, is their application to the second part of my subject.

This second part pertains to phylogenetic plant mutation as distinguished from ordinary plant variation and the production of new fruit varieties. The immediately following remarks embrace in narrative form an account of two cases of saltatory plant mutation which have fallen under my experimental observation. In the spring of 1898 I purchased a couple of dozen young tomato plants of the Acme variety which had been germinated by a gardener near Washington, D. C, and transplanted them, before any of their flower buds were formed, in a garden plot of a few hundred square feet, upon my house lot in the city. Short specific descriptions of these plants and their progeny are given for the purpose of showing their differences.

As the plants matured and fruited they were found to possess all the characteristics of the Acme variety, and of typical L. esculentum. They early became decumbent, and at full maturity they were large and diffuse; the haulms, which were slender and somewhat numerous, reaching a maximum length of more than two meters; color of the foliage a comparatively light green; the petiole-midribs long and slender; leaflets moderately narrow, distant, petiolulate, and their surfaces only slightly rugose; fruit of moderate size, usually depressed-globular in shape, but sometimes transversely oval, uniformly ripened, fleshy and well flavored, and in ripening the chlorophyl green changed to a deep crimson through more or less of yellow.