The Late Mr. R. P. Gregory

Abstract

IN supplement to Prof. Seward's sympathetic notice of the late Mr. R. P. Gregory in NATURE of November 28, I venture to add a few words as to the peculiar interest of his genetic work. Mr. Gregory was at first associated with me in the proof that the familiar heterostylism of Primulas is an allelomorphic phenomenon. He next undertook a laborious inquiry into the sex-polymorphism of Valeriana dioica, but, in spite of much experiment, the case proved intractable, and little positive result was reached. About this time he declined a lucrative post which would have, as he feared, meant the practical abandonment of research, and, undeterred by a rather disappointing experience, he attacked several problems met with in the genetics of Primula sinensis, to which he devoted his spare energies for many years. Mr. Gregory there encountered a group of facts of surprising novelty and importance, which were described in outline in Proc. Roy. Soc., 1914, vol. lxxxvii.B, p. 484. Certain plants known in horticulture as "giants" have all their organs of very large size, and two races of these are, as he proved cytologically, tetraploid, containing four times (forty-eight) the haploid number (twelve) of normal plants. Breeding from such plants, he found that they are actually endowed with four sets of Mendelian factors instead of the usual two sets proper to biparental inheritance. Various paradoxical consequences were, therefore, theoretically possible, and several of these, as he demonstrated, do occur.