I08 MAINE AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. I906. 



of Green Gage plum ; the Tartarian cherries ; and the Crawford 

 peaches are famihar cases in point. But of the immense num- 

 ber of seedHngs produced in this rather haphazard way, very 

 few have been found of superior merit. Improvement by selec- 

 tion, in the strictest sense, has been employed most successfully 

 with annual plants, and the methods used have been gradually 

 perfected. In the choice of the foundation stock, however, the 

 same principles are involved in breeding fruits as in the pro- 

 duction of choice wheat, corn or cotton, namely; Select 

 parents from stock grown in a locality likely to produce vigor- 

 ous, hardy plants, and choose individuals of special merit in 

 some particular direction. In the improvement of grapes, many 

 failures have resulted from the choice of tender varieties as 

 parents, although the quality of fruit was greatly improved. 

 In the work of adapting fruits to different climatic conditions 

 of the states west of Lake Michigan, little real progress was 

 made until the introduction of Russian and other so-called iron- 

 clad varieties as parent stock. The seedlings from varieties 

 grown in Western Europe or Eastern America were entirely 

 unsuited to the new conditions. 



Having the stock from a suitable locality, it is of the highest 

 importance that the individual parent from which seedlings are 

 to be raised shall be the very best of its kind. In working for 

 size in fruit, it is not enough that a plant shall produce one or 

 two abnormally large specimens, but that plants producing a 

 large number of uniformly large specimens should be chosen. 

 In other words, the parent plant should possess in the highest 

 degree the qualities of the ideal form sought, a principle directly 

 contrary to that originally taught by the apostle of selection. 



CROSSING. 



Cross-fertilization and hybridization were little used in the 

 improvement of plants during the first half of the last century. 

 Knight had shown what might be done, and he had many fol- 

 lowers in this country, but the opinion of Van Mons, strength- 

 ened by the indisputable array of choice fruits he had obtained 

 as a result of selection, was almost equally strong. In 1836 

 A. J. Downing wrote: "Assuming Professor Van Mons to be 

 strictly correct, we would suggest that a great saving of time, 



