37° 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



is his long and successful experimentation with berries. This has 

 extended through twenty-five years of constant attention, has involved 

 the use, in hybridizations, of forty different species of Rubus, and has 

 resulted in the origination of a score of new commercial varieties, 

 mostly obtained through various hybridizations of dewberries, black- 

 berries and raspberries. Among these may specially be mentioned the 

 Primus, a hybrid of the western dewberry (R. ursinus) and the Siberian 

 raspberry (R. cratcegifolius) , fixed in the first generation, which ripens 

 its main crop before most of the standard varieties of raspberries and 

 blackberries commence to bloom. (Mr. Burbank does not recommend 

 this for general cultivation; the 'Phenomenal' and Himalaya are 



Early and Abundant Bearing Chestnut Tree. One of hundreds of similar ones, due 

 to crossing and selection. These bear fruit at the age of one and a half years and are never 

 without fruit. 



better.) In this Primus berry, we have the exceptional instance of a 

 gtrong variation, due to hybridization, breeding true from the time of 

 Its first appearance. It usually takes about six generations to fix a 

 jnew variety, but like de Vries's evening primrose mutations, the Primus 

 berrv is a fixed new form from the time of its beginning. An interest- 

 ins feature of Mr. Burbank's brief account, in his ' New Creations ' 

 catalogue of 1894, of the berry experimentation, is a reproduction of a 

 photograph showing " a sample pile of brush 12 ft. vide, 11 ft. high, 

 and 22 ft. long, containing 65,000 two- and three-year-old seedling berry 

 bushes (40,000 blackberry X raspberry hybrids and 25,000 Shaffer X 

 Gregg hybrids) all dug up with their crop of ripening berries." The 



