ABSTRACT
In a world marred by the atomic bombing of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants (1945), co-authored by Darlington and Janaki was published, a benign product of the war. The Chromosome Atlas was a project of assimilation, compilation as well as addition, of new data and ideas, and one of great implications for evolutionary biology. Highlighting the general principles that could be employed in improving plants, the Atlas worked as a reference manual for plant breeders and cytogeneticists equally, with its arrangement of species according to chromosome numbers, that shined new light on systematics, both large and small scale, between families and within species, and on the classification of genera, within and between. Reaffirming the bearing of chromosomal studies on the theory of origin of cultivated plants (that is putting classification back on a genetic basis), Darlington and Janaki’s Chromosome Atlas was unmistakably inspired by Vavilov’s plant geography approach.
