CHAPTER V 



THE WORK OF THE FRENCH HYBRIDISTS 



17. The Experiments of Sageret. 



DURING the time of the prosecution of the work of Knight 

 and Herbert there appeared the results in hybridization 

 obtained by Sageret in France. 



Augustin Sageret was born at Paris, July 27, 1763. He was a 

 naturalist and practical agronomist, was one of the founders of 

 the Society of Horticulture of Paris, and a member of the Royal 

 Society of /\griculture, afterwards called the Academy of xAgri- 

 culture. He was author of an agronomic survey of the canton of 

 Lorris, where he settled at the age of fifty-six, to take up and 

 bring into condition an agricultural domain of 750 acres. He 

 had the honor of having the genus Sageretia named after him by 

 Brogniart. His death occurred in 1851. 



Sageret's experiments in crossing were largely confined to the 

 Cucurbitaceae, and his results were published in a memoir, en- 

 titled "Considerations sur la production des hybrides, des vari- 

 antes et des varietes en general, et sur celles de la famille des 

 Cucurbitacees en particulier," which appeared in 1826, in the 

 Annales des Sciences Naturelles, Yol. 8. (C-) 



Sageret made some discoveries that clearly anticipate our mod- 

 ern knowledge of segregation, and he was able to furnish what 

 was, for the time, a fairly satisfactory scientific explanation for 

 the reappearance of ancestral characters. The experiment upon 

 which his conclusions were primarily based was a cross, in which 

 a muskmelon was the female, and a cantaloupe the male parent. 

 Each plant was regarded as a relatively pure type-representative 

 of its kind. In stating the results of the cross, Sageret for the 

 first time, so far as the writer knows, in the history of plant 

 hybridization, aligned the characters of the parents in opposing 

 or contrasting pairs, after Mendel's fashion forty years later. 



