CHAPTER IV 



THE EARLY ENGLISH HYBRIDISTS 



AT the beginning of the nineteenth century there began to 

 appear in England the first signs of the application of the 

 science of hybridization to the practical art of breeding, in 

 the work of Thomas Andrew Knight, and of William Herbert. 



12. Thomas Andrew Knight. 



Thomas Andrew Knight was a country gentleman by occupa- 

 tion. Born August 12, 1759, he was educated at Oxford, and early 

 began to interest himself on his estate at Elton in Herefordshire 

 in experiments in the raising of new varieties of fruits and vege- 

 tables. In 1795, his work as a horticulturist first became known 

 through some papers read at the sessions of the Royal Society. 

 He was an organizer of the Horticultural Society of London, 

 founded 1804, of which he was president from 1811 until his 

 death in 1838. He was an annual contributor to its "Transac- 

 tions," and was the author of upwards of one hundred papers. 

 In 1841, three years after his death, a collection of eighty-two 

 of his papers was published by the botanists Bentham and Lind- 

 ley. Of Knight's published papers, forty-six are enumerated in 

 the Royal Society's Catalogue. Knight was not a scientific man, 

 but a practical horticulturist with scientific instincts, who pro- 

 ceeded on the principle that the improvement of plants depended 

 upon the same scientific laws as the improvement of animals, and 

 that cross-breeding was the key to the origination of new and im- 

 proved sorts. His principal work of crossing was carried out with 

 currants, grapes, apples, pears, and peaches, to the end of pro- 

 ducing hardier and superior fruits. One of his discoveries of 

 genetic interest was that in crosses of varieties of red upon white 

 currant, by far the greater number of the hybrids produced red 

 fruit, in other words demonstrating the dominance of red. A con- 



