New York Agkicultukal Experiment Station. 447 



INTRODUCTION. 



Apples have been cultivated for many centuries, yet ttere seem 

 never to have been well-ordered efforts to improve this fruit. 

 Of the three thousand or more varieties which have been de- 

 scribed, nearly all, as their histories show, have come from 

 chance seedlings. When one seeks to know what the raw material 

 of our cultivated apples was, and how it has been fashioned into 

 its present shape, he finds little but surmises. It is tri:e that 

 until recently — until the onrush of discoveries made by Mendel 

 and his followers — plant breeding was little more than dally- 

 ing in the by-ways of biological science; but there seems to have 

 been no time when even what was passing as current coin in 

 plant-breeding was used to any considerable extent in improving 

 the apple or, for that matter, any tree fruit. Not only has there 

 been apathy, but error and laxity are more prominent than truth 

 and exactness in the little work that has been done. 



It is not strange that pomologists have been laggards while 

 agriculturists, gardeners and florists have at least been working. 

 For, as all can see, it is much more difficult to put the principles 

 and methods of plant breeding in practice with fruits. Thus, 

 with trees, much more time and money are required to secure 

 results ; the harvests have been and must ever be more meagre, 

 for but comparatively few trees can be grown in breeding experi- 

 ments ; individuals have not taken up the work with fruits, 

 because the pecuniary rewards have been small — in most cases 

 nil ; until recently there have been no public institutions having 

 plant-breeding to do and these have been forced to work in the 

 fields where the yields are most immediate ; plant-breeding has 

 been so changeable that it has been impossible to lay out a piece 

 of work with fruits and complete the task as planned ; lastly, 

 such laws of breeding as we have had have been worked out for 

 herbaceous plants and fruit growers have very generally believed 

 that trees do not follow the same laws — a notion that crops out 

 not infrequently in the scientific literature of the past. 



We ought now, however, to be able to breed fruits much more 

 advantageously than in the past. Under the ferment of Men- 

 delian ideas a sufficient body of knowledge has been produced to 



