Evening star., 1940-11-05
Of Stors, Men
And Atoms
Notebook of Science Progress
In Laboratory. Field
And Study
BIZ Thomas r. Henry.

~ ~PN"~S ~s' NN~'''
Waving fields of Kentucky bluegrass
and icy waters of the North Atlantic
last September are linked in a report
just made public by the American
Genetics Society here.
Generations hence when the lush pas
turage of the bluegrass country is ex-
tended into regions of drought and cold,
the wind over the fields will be ghostly
echo of the sinking Athena. On board
were about a dozen American scientists
who had been attending the meetings of
the World Genetics Congress in Edin-
burgh when war broke out.
All but two were rescued. Those who
perished were DR.. and Mrs. Fred w.
Tinney of the United States Department
Of Agriculture Experiment Station at
Madison, Wis. They were seen enter
ing a lifeboat, but never were heard
from again.
But DR.. Tinney had brought nearly
to completion the most significant work
of his life with the discovery of a means
of breeding new kinds Of bluegrass The
finishing touches have now been made
by his associates and the results pub
lished in the Journal of Heredity, off,
cial organ of the society.
Bluegrass is recognized as affording
highly nutritious pasturage to stock. I.
Is a European plant, the seeds Of which
were brought to America in Colonial
times. Now its range extends over the
Eastern and East Central States and into
Canada, and this has seemed TO be the
limit of its habitat, for bluegrass has
shown very little adaptability to ad-
verse conditions.
Bluegrass, it seemed, never crossed.
Each plant was essentially a duplicate
of the parent. There was little of that
individual variation practically universal
among plants and animals which is one
of the essential elements of evolution.
DR.. Tinney and his associates had
solved this mystery before he left for
Europe. He had collected seed from
Wisconsin, Missouri, Virginia, Eastern
Canada, Norway. Sweden, Denmark,
England, India and Russia. These seeds
consin and the mystery of their same
ness found to be due to a strange kind of
parthogenesis known as apomiticallis.
The flowers of bluegrass are pollinated
and supposedly fertile seeds produced.
But after a short period of embryonic
development takes place, the embryo
plant disintegrates. That would be the
end of it were it not for the fact that a
bud becomes rooted in the disintegrated
seed. This forms the most fertile pos
Sible soil, experiments have shown. Al
most literally the bluegrass plant slips"
itself after preparing its own hotbed.
The same phenomenon has been OBJ
served with oranges and lemons and is
the latest tool placed in the hands of the
plant breeder. But, DR.. Tinney found,
in essentially per cent of the new blue
grass stalks, there was slight variation.
This showed that the grass must be
growing a few progeny from pollen
fertilized seed or that mutations were
taking place, due to factors in the
environment.
This, it is pointed out in the report,
prepared in collaboration with DR.. o. S.
Aamodt of the United States Depart
ment of Agriculture, affords a great
advantage. 1t will be possible to make
rigid tests of bluegrass variant individ-
uals. They can be grown under con-
trolled conditions of drought, cold. etc,
and those which survive isolated and
perpetuated.
There will be no danger that they will
revert to type because the hereditary
elements in their seed cells are no longer
operating. Henceforth they will go on,
in whatever environment is found for
them, by the self-slipping process.
A nearly complete skeleton of a giant
uintathere has just been recovered from
approximately 10000 OOO-year-old de-
posits in the Bridger Basin of Southern
Wyoming by DR.. Charles L. Gain,
Smithsonian Institution paleontologist
This fantastic creature was probably
the dominant animal of the mid -Eocene
period in North America-a time when
the ancestral forms of present-day man.
mails were taking shape out of the con-
fusion of primitive -blooded crea-
lures 1t was about the size of an
elephant. Parts of the skeleton, espe-
cially the feet, might easily be mistaken
for those of some primitive member of
the elephant family.
The uintathere, however, belonged to
an entirely different line of evolution.
1t, perhaps, resembled the rhinoceros
more than any other extant creature
but cannot be considered in the direct
ancestral line. After the mid -Eocene, it
disappeared from the earth, making way
for the more efficient animals repre-
sented by extant forms. It's bones are
found only in the Bridger deposits,
classic field for mid-Eocene fauna.
In appearance the uintathere must
have been a fearSome creature. 1t had
six horns on it's skull. Protruding from
its upper jaw were two sabers, from 10
inches to a foot long, similar to those
of the saber- -toothed tiger. It's face was
prolonged into a snout But while it
would have been formidable antagonist,
all this fighting equipment, it is likely,
was for defense primarily. The uinta-
there was an herbivorous mammal, as
are most creatures who attain gigan-
ticism. Presumably it was a stupid
creature
The causes of its extinction, DR.. Gain
explains, are unknown. The line, to-