New Yokk Agkicultukal Experiment Station. 453 



tions of existing characters. Of course, even so, they may furnish 

 material for improvement, slight though it be. When a varia- 

 tion is found in an apple tree there must always be the question 

 as to whether it is transmissible or merely a fluctuation due to 

 the environment of the plant which Avill disappear with a change 

 in the environment. AVe are wholly ignorant of the causes or 

 of the conditions which give rise to mutations, although one may 

 now hear provisional whispers as to how they originate. Their 

 exceeding rarity as compared with the countless number of varia- 

 tions which are not transmitted through heredity, shows that 

 varieties of apples, as of other fruits and most other plants propa- 

 gated from vegetative parts, are wonderfully stable and practi- 

 cally continuous. This brings us to the subject of improving 

 apples by bud-selection. 



BIPEOVING APPLES BY BUD-SELECTION. 



The idea is current among experiment station workers, nur- 

 serymen and fruit growers that the apple, and other fruits as 

 well, can be improved by bud-selection. It is held that the varia- 

 tions in fruit, tree, productiveness, vigor and hardiness to be 

 found in varieties of fruit, can be reproduced by taking cions or 

 buds from the plants possessing the variations. A number of 

 fruit growers and nurser^^nen are putting this theory in practice 

 and trees are now offered for sale with a " pedigree " to show 

 that they came from known, good ancestry. 



A study of the varieties of apjDlcs, grapes and plums^ now 

 grown gives no evidence, whatever, that any sort of these fruits 

 has come into existence by continuous selection ; that any variety 

 has been improved, or that any variety has degenerated through 

 the cumulative action of natural or artificial selection. No precise 

 experimental evidence has been offered to prove that varieties of 

 fruit can be changed in the least by continuous bud-selection. 

 The trend of scientific thought is now overwhelmingly against 

 the transmission of acquired characters, as most variations seem 

 to be, and against continuous selection as a process of improving 

 or changing plants grown from seeds, and would, if directed to 

 bud-selection, be much more against this supposed means of 

 improving plants. 



1 Tlie historips of tlio best known varieties of these three fruits, so far as 

 they can be learned, are given in the books on these fruits published by this 

 Station. 



