THE IMPROVEMENT OF PLANTS 583 



provemeut of any kind, has in a few years won a permanent place in 

 southern agriculture. 



It may he argued that the improvement of our native plants would 

 be too slow to justify attempts in this direction. I should answer that 

 nothing is too slow that will pay. Xations bond themselves for hun- 

 dreds of millions of dollars to carry on a war of the present, which 

 bonds their children must pay sometime in the future, and for no com- 

 pensation except to maintain the pledged honor of the nation. While 

 breeding is slow when judged from the " get-rich-quick " standpoint of 

 modern Chicago, it is not slow when compared with the life of a na- 

 tion and from the standpoint of permanent welfare. AVithin the mem- 

 ory of man the tomato has been introduced into cultivation and ad- 

 vanced in size from a fruit of f of an inch in diameter to our fine mod- 

 ern fruits, some of which grow as large as 4 inches in diameter. 



A strildng illustration of this nature is furnished by the experi- 

 ments that the writer has conducted in the improvement of timothy. 

 Timothy was introduced into cultivation about 1720, nearly two cen- 

 turies ago. For many years it has been extensively grown, but, until 

 recently, no attempts have been made to develop improved races. In 

 experiments conducted by the Cornell Experiment Station, timothy 

 seed was obtained from a large number of places in this and foreign 

 countries, from which about 18,000 individual plants were grown and 

 the different types studied and isolated. As a result of 9 years of work, 

 some 200 difEerent races have been secured that show a very wide range 

 of characters, and vary from dwarfs to giants in size. A test of the 

 yields of 17 of these new varieties in comparison with the best timothy 

 seed that could be purchased in the market was made in 1910, and also 

 in 1911. In 1910 the average yield of the 17 new sorts was 7,451 

 pounds per acre and that of the 7 check plats of ordinary timothy was 

 6,600 pounds per acre; an average increase of 851 pounds per acre in 

 favor of the new varieties. In 1911 the average yield of the 17 new 

 sorts was 7,153 pounds per acre and that of the 7 check plats was 4,091 

 pounds per acre; an average increase of 3,062 pounds per acre in favor 

 of the new varieties. Four of the high yielding sorts in 1911 gave an 

 increased yield of over 2 tons per acre, or practically double the aver- 

 age yield of the checks, which is an astonishing figure and can be ex- 

 plained only by the fact that timothy has never been improved by breed- 

 ing and still consists, as generally cultivated, of a motley array of 

 many difEerent types. 



Hay is one of the largest agricultural crops of the United States, 

 outranking all other crops, except corn, in total value of production. 

 In 1910, according to the statements issued by the United States De- 

 partment of Agriculture, there were grown in the United States 45,- 

 691,000 acres of hay, which yielded a crop having a farm valuation of 

 $747,769,000. Xo statistics are available from which we can determine 



