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Updated: June 3, 2025
Such heads are as completely double as are the brightest heads of the most beautiful double commercial varieties of composites. Real atavists or real reversionists were seen no more after the first purification of the race. I have continued my culture and secured last summer as many and as completely doubled heads as previously. The race has at once become permanent and constant.
I made this experiment in the summer of 1900 with the eighth generation of my race, and contrived to isolate three groups of plants by the use of parchment bags, covering them alternately, so the flowers of only one group were accessible to insects, at a time. I made three groups, because the atavists show two different types.
They are generally called atavists or reversionists, but even these terms are sometimes used in a different sense. Lastly it is to be said that the empirical and experimental evidence as to the question of constancy is not as extensive as it should be. The experimental conditions are seldom described, and it is only recently that an interest in the matter has been awakened.
The twisted parents gave as many as 41% twisted children, but the decussate atavists gave even somewhat more, viz., 44%, while the ternate specimens gave 37%. Obviously the divergences between these figures are too slight to be dwelt upon, but the fact that the atavists are as true or nearly as true inheritors of the twisted race as the best selected individuals is clearly proved by this experience.
A sharper contrast between good representatives of a race and their atavists is perhaps to be seen in no other instance. All the details contribute to the differentiation in appearance. The whole stature of the plants is affected by the varietal mark.
One might even suppose that the normal individuals, or the so-called atavists, had really reverted to the original type of the species and that their progeny would remain true to this. My experiments, however, have shown that quite the contrary is the case. No doubt, the seeds of the monstrous specimens are trustworthy, but the seeds of the atavists are not less so.
There is no transgression, no springing over into a purely atavistic form, such as may be supposed to have once been the ancestor of the present cockscomb. The variety includes crests and atavists, and may be perpetuated from both.
From this reason it is as interesting to appreciate the hereditary position of the atavists of twisted varieties as it was for the red-flowered descendants of the striped flowers. In order to ascertain this relation it is only necessary to isolate some of them during the blooming-period.
Here we have the true type of an ever-sporting variety. Every year it produces in the same way heirs and atavists. Every plant, if fertilized with its own pollen, gives rise to both types. The parent itself may be tricotylous or dicotylous, or show any amount of multiplication and cleavage in its seed-leaves, but it always gives the entire range among its progeny of the variation.
The atavists are not, as in the case of the poppies, obviously allied with the type by a full range of intermediate steps, but quite distant from it by their rarity.
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