Results From Work in Breeding Hardy Fruits. 271 



1 



Some fifteen years ago an experiment was made in crossing the 

 "Briar Sweet Crab with pollen of the Pound Sweet apple. The Briar 

 Sweet is a seedling of the old Large Red Siberian, and an undoubted 

 • cross with the Bailey Sweet; the limbs of these trees interlocking with 

 those from which the seed was taken. In this cross the Bailey 

 Sweet predominated largely, both in size and quality of fruit over the 

 Siberian, while the latter transmitted its hadiness, and mildly its 

 crab-like quality. Eleven seedlings were grown from this cross, three 

 were destroyed, seven of them have fruited and all are sweet apples, 

 an achievement in breeding true to type, which I believe has never 

 been surpassed in so short a period, and especially when we consider 

 the hereditary low breeding of the Siberian. Five of them are of 

 good to excellent quality, and range in size from the parent hybrid 

 to the Fameuse apple. 



In these crosses there is the foundation for breeding a family of 

 sweet apples for the North that will produce sweet apples in variety, 

 about as surely as Short Horns will produce Short Horns. Wolf 

 River crossed on Briar Sweet has produced some curious specimens 

 Ijut only one good summer apple. In all crosses with the Siberian its 

 long inbreeding in nature leaves its impress on leaf and bark, or size, 

 or quality, or seed and capsule; and many times on a number of these 

 ■characters combined. One of the results noted in this cross pollen- 

 izing work is that close up in the breeding of the Jonathan is a 

 sweet apple. 



Another, by far the more important in this breeding problem, 

 is that the male parent dominates in giving color to the new fruit. 

 Exceptions to this general law may be numerous, but color is one of 

 the most persistent characters in nature. This fact is most clearly 

 demonstrated in Bulletin No. 2 2, U. S. Department of Agriculture, 

 Division of Vegetable Physiology and Pathology, entitled "Immediate 

 Effects of Pollen in Maize," prepared by Herbert J. Webber. Therein 

 it is shown that all varieties and colors of corn experimented with 

 transmitted, with but few exceptions, the distinct colors of the male 

 parent, to the kernels of corn with which it was crossed, and not color 

 alone but form as well. Prof. Hugo de Vries' paper on "Atavism" 

 published in the first volume of the International Conference on Plant 

 Breeding, strongly confirms, incidentally, the theory of the color 

 influence of the male flower. Prof. S. A. Beach's experiments at the 

 New York Agricultural Experiment Station, in crossing a white grape 

 with another white variety, produced from a large number of seedlings 

 only white grapes; notwithstanding one of these crossed grapes was 

 the product of two colored sorts. Color is one of the most persistent 



