In the second generation of the flies bred by Miss Rawls, one female gave (March 1912) only 3 sons, although she gave 312 daughters. It was not known for some time (see lethals 3 and 3a) what was the cause of this extreme rarity of sons. It is now apparent, however, that this mother carried lethal 1 in one X and in the other X a new lethal which had arisen by mutation. The new lethal was very close to lethal 1, as shown by the rarity of the surviving sons, which are cross-overs between lethal 1 and the new lethal that we may call lethal 1a. There is another class of cross-overs, namely, those which have lethal 1 and get lethal 1a by crossing-over. These doubly lethal males must also die, but since they are theoretically as numerous as the males (3) free from both lethals, we must double this number (3 × 2) to get the total number of cross-overs. There were 312 daughters, but as the sons are normally about 96 per cent of the number of the females,
we may take 300 as the number of the males which died. There must have been, then, about 2 per cent of crossing-over, which makes lethal 1a lie about 2 units from lethal 1. This location of lethal 1a is confirmed by a test that Miss Rawls made of the daughters of the high-ratio female. Out of 98 of these daughters none repeated the high sex-ratio and only 2 gave 1 ♀ : 1 ♂ ratios. The two daughters which gave 1 : 1 ratios are cross-overs. There should be an equal number of cross-overs which contain both lethals. These latter would not be distinguishable from the non-cross-over females, each of which carries one or the other lethal. In calculation, allowance can be made for them by doubling the number of observed cross-overs (2 × 2) and taking 98 - 2 as the number of non-cross-overs. The cross-over fraction {6 + 4}/{300 + 96} gives 2.6 as the distance between the two lethals. Lethal 1a is probably to the right of lethal 1 at 0.7 + 2.6 = 3.3.
SPOT.
([Plate II], figures 14 to 17.)
In April 1912 there was found in the stock of yellow flies a male that differed from yellow in that it had a conspicuous light spot on the upper surface of the abdomen (Morgan, 1914a). In yellow flies this region is dark brown in color. In crosses with wild flies the spot remained with the yellow, and although some 30,000 flies were raised, none of the gray offspring showed the spot, which should have occurred had crossing-over taken place. The most probable interpretation of spot is that it was due to another mutation in the yellow factor, the first mutation being from gray to yellow and the second from yellow to spot.
Spot behaves as an allelomorph to yellow in all crosses where the two are involved and is completely recessive to yellow, i. e., the yellow-spot hybrid is exactly like yellow. A yellow-spot female, back-crossed to a spot male, produces yellows and spots in equal numbers.
In a cross of spot to black it was found that the double recessive, spot black, flies that appear in F2 have, in addition to the spot on the abdomen, another spot on the scutellum and a light streak on the thorax. These two latter characters ("dot and dash") are very sharply marked and conspicuous when the flies are young, but they are only juvenile characters and disappear as the flies become older. The spot flies never show the "dot and dash" clearly, and it only comes out when black acts as a developer. These characters furnish a good illustration of the fact that mutant gens ordinarily affect many parts of the body, though these secondary effects often pass unnoticed.
In the F2 of the cross of spot by black one yellow black fly appeared, although none are expected, on the assumption that spot and yellow
are allelomorphic. Unless due to crossing-over it must have been a mutation from spot back to yellow. Improbable as this may seem to those who look upon mutations as due to losses from the germ-plasm, yet we have records of several other cases where similar mutations "backwards" have taken place, notably in the case of eosin to white, under conditions where the alternative interpretation of crossing-over is excluded.
SABLE.