300 The Plant World. 



from one plant to another, breaking a single pod on each plant 

 to find one which was minus the string. Hundreds of plants were 

 tested and passed. How many hundred plants he tested before 

 he received his reward, Mr. Keeney does not know. Indefatig- 

 able in his search for the ideal, the fascination of the himt was 

 so intense that nothing short of absolute defeat would allow him 

 to stop. He had made up his mind to examine every plant in 

 that field if necessary. 



Reward came at last, however, One day Mr. Keeney found 

 a pod which broke clean, and which had not a vestige of a string. 

 He marked the plant, but was not ready to stop there; having 

 found one plant that was stringless, he felt there must be others 

 in the same field, and the search was continued until several 

 hundred more plants had been examined, when a second string- 

 less pod was discovered and marked. To be sure that he had 

 not made a mistake in calling these beans stringless, the plants 

 were visited again in a week, and each tested by breaking a 

 pod, the results justifying his belief that all the pods on each 

 plant were stringless. 



He was now ready to go ahead with his work of developing 

 a race of stringless Refugee Wax string-beans. There were two 

 things to be done: First, the stringless characteristics must be 

 fixed ; that is the plants must be grown year after year, and the 

 seeds saved from only those which produced stringless pods. 

 The first year all of the beans from the stringless pods were 

 planted and grown under ordinary field conditions. The beans 

 from each plant, however, were planted in separate plots, great 

 care being taken that they should not be mixed. The crop from 

 each plot was saved, and planted separately the following year, 

 the idea being to note carefully the comparative merits of the 

 two families, with the intention of saving only the better one in 

 case they were not alike. 



The following year Mr. Keeney had as many plots of beans 

 as he had plants the year before. Each plot was carefully 

 watched, and the plants bearing undesirable pods removed. 

 When the harvest came each plot was gathered separately, 

 only the product of the best plants being saved. Each succeed- 

 ing year the progeny of the first two plants were grown separately 

 and only the best plants saved. Finally, when the habit of pro- 

 ducing stringless beans was well fixed, and the plants were bear- 



