DAIRY AND SEED IMPROVEMENT MEETINGS. 2/5 



of any well-bred Jerseys and they probably date back to two 

 or three prepotent animals. Take race horses ; you will find 

 that most of our race horses trace back to two or three very 

 exceptional individuals. We are finding the same thing in our 

 plant work. 



Now you see all this dift'ers considerably from the method of 

 selection which has generally been practiced. Suppose we are 

 going to begin with one thousand potatoes. We will take the 

 best looking ones ; they are not selected at all, but we simply go 

 to our bins and pick them out ; we do not know the hills from 

 which they came. We will cut each potato into four pieces, so 

 each potato will produce four hills ; then we will plant the four 

 hills consecutively, possibly putting up a little stick as a marker ; 

 then planting four hills, put up another stick and plant four 

 more hills, and so on, until we have 4,000 hills. Each potato 

 has been cut into four pieces and we have four hills for each. 

 We will then give this little potato patch ordinary care, and at 

 the end of the season we will dig the crop. We will dig the 

 potatoes in the first four hills — that were planted from one 

 potato — and put them in a little pile ; then we will dig the next 

 four hills, and so on, each pile representing the yield from one 

 potato, until we have a thousand piles. This experiment gives 

 us .the yielding power of these potatoes. When these piles are 

 on the ground, we will go down through the field and eliminate 

 the poor strains ; some will be irregular and some will be small. 

 After eliminating the poor ones, we will choose the best of 

 those remaining, taking ten tubers from each of the best piles 

 for the second year's planting. The next year we will do the 

 same thing, planting them in a small plot where we can pick 

 them by hand ; again, we will choose the second year and 

 carry the experiment on to the third and possibly, the fourth 

 year. At the end of that time we shall have eliminated the poor 

 strains and kept the best. This is not a difficult thing to do ; 

 it requires a little record keeping, because of the pedigree se- 

 lection. We began with a thousand potatoes ; then we selected 

 a few, and we want to keep a record until we obtain our 

 results. 



There is another method which I think is easier to carry out 

 and perhaps it is, on the whole, more practical ; that is, when 

 we dig our potatoes in the fall we will plan to dig a part of 



