Total : 495.50 : 641.75.

The seven crossed plants (for two of them died) here average 70.78
inches, and the nine self-fertilised plants 71.3 inches in height; or as
100 to barely 101. In four out of these five pots, a self-fertilised
plant flowered before any one of the crossed plants. So that,
differently from the last case, the self-fertilised plants are in some
respects slightly superior to the crossed.

If we now consider the crossed and self-fertilised plants of the three
generations, we find an extraordinary diversity in their relative
heights. In the first generation, the crossed plants were inferior to
the self-fertilised as 100 to 178; and the flowers on the original
parent-plants which were crossed with pollen from a distinct plant
yielded much fewer seeds than the self-fertilised flowers, in the
proportion of 100 to 150. But it is a strange fact that the
self-fertilised plants, which were subjected to very severe competition
with the crossed, had on two occasions no advantage over them. The
inferiority of the crossed plants of this first generation cannot be
attributed to the immaturity of the seeds, for I carefully examined
them; nor to the seeds being diseased or in any way injured in some one
capsule, for the contents of the ten crossed capsules were mingled
together and a few taken by chance for sowing. In the second generation
the crossed and self-fertilised plants were nearly equal in height. In
the third generation, crossed and self-fertilised seeds were obtained
from two plants of the previous generation, and the seedlings raised
from them differed remarkably in constitution; the crossed in the one
case exceeded the self-fertilised in height in the ratio of 100 to 83,
and in the other case were almost equal. This difference between the two
lots, raised at the same time from two plants growing in the same pot,