New York Agricultural Experiment Station. 405 



as well as " seedless." Now this suppression of floral organs and 

 seeds comes from seedlings, so far as we can learn from the more 

 or less obscure histories of a score of seedless apples, from normal 

 parents. In no case is there anything to lead to the suspicion that 

 the loss of the capacity to produce seeds is the accumulated retro- 

 gression of several generations. In other words, seedless varieties 

 of apples, and of such other fruits as opportunity has offered to 

 study, appear to be sports or mutations. The Navel orange, the 

 Stoneless plum, the Lombardy poplar, Sultana, Zante and several 

 other grapes are well known varieties of species which commonly 

 bear seeds. All historical evidence shows that these probably 

 came into being as mutations. 



Curiously enough no one seems ever to have tried planting the 

 occasional seed to be found in seedless fruits, thus to ascertain 

 whether the abnormality is passed from parent to offspring. If 

 true mutations, such should be the case. Seedlings of seedless 

 apples and a seedless pear, though crossed with other varieties, 

 should fruit at Geneva this year or next and in time we may know 1 

 more about the inheritance of seedlessness. Meanwhile, apple- 

 growers everywhere should be on the lookout for seedless sorts and 

 when found, even though other characters are such as to make 

 them worthless, they should be preserved as possible starting points 

 for new and better seedless kinds if hybridization be possible or 

 if they can be made to produce a few selfed seeds. 



A character so markedly abnormal as seedlessness might be ex- 

 pected to carry with it correlations in fruit or plant. In the obser- 

 vation of seedlessness at this Station the search for correlations 

 has been fascinating, indeed irresistible, but the rewards have been 

 no greater than in similar searches for this interesting phenomenon 

 — correlation. A few dubious statements can be set down from 

 the hasty work done with the apples on our grounds. The abortion 

 or malformation of one or several of the floral organs that accom- 

 panies most of the seedless apples has been mentioned. Such 

 abnormalities are, of course, cause of the effect more than correla- 

 tions with seedlessness. The apples in all seedless varieties that 



