VARIATION IN TRILLIUM GRANDIFLORUM. 



H. W. Britcher. 



To all those who have cultivated vegetable or flower gardens 

 it has probably been a matter of frequent observation that, in any 

 bed composed of plants all of the same sort, there have been 

 individual differences or variations. Some of the plants have 

 been more vigorous growers than others and have come to earlier 

 maturity. In some of the plants the flowers have been uniformly 

 of larger size or perhaps have shown a tendency to be double 

 or in some other way differ from the flowers of the rest of the 

 plants. The horticulturist, growing plants in large quantities, 

 has a much wider field of observation. When he finds a plant 

 exhibiting a slight variation which he considers of value he 

 carefully saves the seed and from it raises another generation 

 of plants, some of which will show the variation in intensified 

 form. From such plants another generation is raised and the 

 process is repeated until the variation becomes fixed, that is, 

 until the desired character is present in all the plants raised from 

 the selected seed. This is known as artificial selection and is one 

 of the ways in which new and improved varieties are produced. 

 Propagation from sports, or plants in which variations become 

 fixed in a single generation, is another method and hybridization 

 is still another. By these methods most of our cultivated crops 

 of the present day have been developed or artificially evolved 

 from, in most cases, practically worthless ancestors. In his book- 

 entitled "The Evolution of Our Native Fruits," Professor Bailey 

 says : "The American grapes have given rise to eight hundred 

 domestic varieties, the American plums to more than two hun- 

 dred, the raspberries to three hundred and various other native 

 fruits have a long cultivated progeny." 



In "Animals and Plants Under Domestication" Darwin pre- 

 sented a vast amount of material on artificial selection, and in 



