Selection of Elementary Species 97 



market under the name of ^^ Talavera de 

 Bellevue. " It is a tall, white variety, with long 

 and slender white heads, almost without awns, 

 and with fine white pointed kernels. It was in- 

 troduced into commerce about 1830, and is still 

 one of the most generally cultivated French 

 wheats. It was highly prized in the magnifi- 

 cent collection of drawings and descriptions of 

 wheats, published by Vilmorin under the title 

 ** Les meilleurs bles " and is said to have quite 

 a number of valuable qualities, branching freely 

 and producing an abundance of good grain and 

 straw. It is however, sensitive to cold win- 

 ters in some degree and thereby limited in its 

 distribution. Hallett, the celebrated English 

 wheat-breeder, tried in vain to improve the 

 peculiar qualities of this valuable production 

 of Le Couteur's. 



Le Couteur worked during many years along 

 this line, long before the time when Vilmorin 

 conceived the idea of improvement by race- 

 selections, and he used only the simple 

 principle of distinguishing and isolating the 

 members of his different fields. Later he pub- 

 lished his results in a work on the varieties, 

 peculiarities and classification of wheat (1843), 

 which though now very rare, has been the basis 

 and origin of the principle of variety-testing. 



The discovery of Lagasca and Le Couteur was 



