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Updated: June 27, 2025
No mutationist has yet produced by breeding experiments a caterpillar without the three pairs of thoracic legs and yet developing into a moth that had normal three pairs. Morgan, with all his mutations of the adult Drosophila, says nothing of mutants possessing legs.
It is his thought that a species may run along uniformly for a long time when, from some cause which he has not determined as yet, instability comes into the species and it varies in quite a number of directions. Each of these variations may be the starting point of a new species. DeVries believes that he has at least half a dozen mutants of his new Evening Primrose.
The mutants like any other variants must present themselves before the jury of environmental circumstances, which passes judgment upon their condition of adaptation, and they, too, must abide by the verdict that means life or death.
This is at once manifest, if we compare the group of new mutants with the swarms of elementary forms which compose some of the youngest systematic species, and which, as we have seen before, are to be considered as the results of previous mutations. The difference lies in the fact that the evening-primroses have been seen to spring from their ancestors and that the drabas have not.
Once produced they are absolutely constant. I have tried many thousands of seeds from various dwarf mutants, and never observed any trace of reversion to the lamarckiana type. I have also cultivated them in successive generations with the same result.
Owing partly to improved methods of selection, partly no doubt to chance, even more mutants were found this year than in the former. Out of some 8,000 seedlings I counted 377 deviating ones, or nearly 5%, which is a high proportion. Most of them were oblonga and lata, the same types that had constituted the majority in the former year.
Of course by far the largest number of them were thrown away as soon as they showed their differentiating characters in order to make room for the remaining ones. At last only a few plants were left to blossom in order to perpetuate the race. I have indicated for each generation the number of mutants of each of the observed forms, placing them in vertical columns underneath their respective heads.
On the other hand the mutants, that constitute the first representatives of their race, exhibit all the attributes of the new type in full display at once. No series of generations, no selection, no struggle for existence are needed to reach this end.
Mutations can be made according to Mendel's Law; but when we have made them once we can always be sure of producing the very same mutants again in the very same way, as surely as we produce a definite chemical compound; and when we have made it we can always resolve it at will back into its original form, just as we can a chemical compound.
It was an empire ruled by a single family who called themselves the Great Nobles; at their head was the Greatest Noble the Child of the Sun Himself. It has since been conjectured that the Great Nobles were mutants in the true sense of the word; a race apart from their subjects.
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