274 AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



give a good crop next year. You men know that you may have 

 some superior animals, but you are not absoKitely sure that they 

 will produce superior animals ; the chances are they will, but 

 you are not sure. 



What should be done? Suppose you take fifty of the ears 

 and, instead of shelling them and mixing the corn, you take the 

 corn from each of these ears and plant it in a row by itself, 

 and then see what will happen. The fifty ears all looked good; 

 to all intents and purposes they were the same, but by planting 

 the kernels of those ears in separate rows, and then by husking 

 the corn separately when it is matured and piling it on the 

 ground at the end of the row, you will have a representation 

 of the progeny of each ear and you can see what a surprising 

 difference there is — ranging from 50 to 100 per cent — in the 

 yields; all the way from 13 bushels to the acre up to the rate 

 of 75 and 80 bushels to the acre. We have found out the dif- 

 ference in the first year ; then we want to test the transmitting 

 power for the second year, and find out whether it will con- 

 tinue to produce the third year. From the little piles we choose 

 a few more good cars ; we want to find out whether the corn 

 that grew in the first row will give as good a yield the second 

 year. We find it necessary to try out these strains for four or 

 five years, in order to find the strain that has the highest yield- 

 ing capacity in it ; and, when you have done that, the principal 

 thing is to keep that strain pure. In other words, we find in 

 our farm crops, or in any group of plants, that they consist of 

 a mixture of strains. Take the Green Mountain potato — 

 which is as uniform as almost any variety — and plant the seed 

 individually, pick up the crop by hand, studying the different 

 hills carefully ; you will be surprised to see how little uniform- 

 ity the potatoes have. This is true of all varieties of potatoes 

 at the present time. You can see what we are really doing 

 in that little experiment of the corn. We are really separating 

 these better strains from the others. You can readily see if wc 

 can pick out some of these superior strains, you will make much 

 more rapid progr-ess than you could in any other way. 



Is this not what is going on with our dairy cows? Consider 

 for a moment; in dairy breeds — if you are familiar with the 

 Jersey — you will immediately think of certain animals that 

 have been the beginning of superior strains. You take a group 



