Flower color was especially perplexing, he said. When he crossed the white bush bean with the red scarlet runner bean (P. multiflorus), his results were not what he had expected. “Apart from the fact that from the union of a white and a purple-red coloring a whole series of colors results, from purple to pale violet and white,” he said, “the circumstance is a striking one that among thirty-one flowering plants only one received the recessive character of the white color, while in Pisum this occurs on the average in every fourth plant.” It was to explain such anomalies, in fact, that he
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