Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/164

158 resulting crop of fruit gave no visible indication of impending mutation. I as carefully preserved seed from this crop as I had done in the former case, and planted them in my garden in 1901, believing that I should produce Acme plants, notwithstanding my former experience. On the contrary, the result was an exact duplication of my experience with the crop of 1899, every plant and every fruit partaking fully and uniformly of the duplicated mutation. The plant description, including that of the fruit, which is given in the immediately preceding paragraph applies as exactly to the plants of the crop of 1901 as it does to those of the crop of 1899. Fig. 1 represents a plant of this crop in the early stage of its growth, when it was beginning to shed its first flowers. Its deeper shade of green adds to the difference of aspect between the mother and daughter forms.

The Figures 1 and 2 are copies of photographs which were taken of the plants as they were then growing in my garden. The plant represented by Fig. 1 bore the new variety, which I have called the Washington. That which is represented by Fig. 2 bore the Acme variety. Although it can not be proved that the particular plant which is represented by Fig. 1 actually came from a seed borne by the plant represented by Fig. 2, I do not hesitate to assert positively that the plant form represented by Fig. 1 is the immediate progeny of the form represented by Fig. 2. I make this statement with all the more confidence because all the work of my garden has been done con amore by my own hands, including the planting of the seed, the plucking of the fruit from which the seed was taken, and the curing and preserving of the seed for the next year's planting. In all this work I practised the same conscientious care that I have done in all my other scientific work in other fields. No tomato seed other than that which I have mentioned was in my possession during all the time my experiments were in progress, and I do not admit the possibility that any other seed was at any time substituted. Even if there had been any such substitution, it would not account for the mutations which I have described, which were phylogenetic in character and not the result of hybridization. The fruit of the mutated plant species was also a new variety and would not, in any ordinary case of germination, have been produced by seed of any other variety previously known. This new variety is as distinct as are any other fine varieties, and it has been true to seed every year since its origination. If my Acme plants, in either of the cases mentioned, had received adventitious fertilization by pollen from any other flowers than those of their connate crop associates, the cross fertilization would