368 Bulletin 373 



to breed true to type and which have given superior yields in clonal rows, 

 inbred seed rows, and broadcast plats, have been chosen as worth 3^ of 

 presentation to the public as superior new varieties. These will be prop- 

 agated as rapidly as possible and will be distributed to fanners of the 

 State as soon as sufficient seed can be produced. 



It must be recognized that these varieties have not been tested on 

 various soils and it is possible, and even probable, that some of them 

 may fail to give good results under other conditions. Trials of a number 

 of types are being made in different parts of the State and these will 

 probably give next year some hints of what can be expected ; but the final 

 value of a new race of any plant can be determined only by its success in 

 extensive commercial cultivation over wide areas. The breeder's intro- 

 duction of any variety or race, though based on the m.ost careful experi- 

 mental trials, must nevertheless be an experiment and only after a number 

 of years of general cultivation can the true value of the variety be 

 determined. 



METHOD OF ISOLATING A PURE TYPE AND MULTIPLYING THE SEED 



In the Cornell experiments, two methods of isolating a pure type have 

 been pursued. In the first method, when the test of a type in rows grov\rn 

 from inbred seed shows that the type has reproduced its important 

 characters and can be considered as a fixed variety, good typical plants 

 in the trial rows are selected and their heads bagged in order to procure 

 self-fertilized seed. Following this, the selfed seed is grown in sterilized 

 soil and the little plants are transplanted at the proper time into small 

 plats, which are placed so that they will be at least one hundred feet, or 

 preferably a greater distance, from one another and from any other 

 timothy. Rye, or some other tall crop that will tower above them when 

 they are in bloom, is then grown around these plats (Fig. 95), In 

 such plats the individual plants have been placed 18 inches apart each 

 way, which arrangement allows of some cultivation at first and gives 

 sufficient distance for each plant to develop separately so that the plat 

 can be examined carefully before flowering and all inferior or off-type 

 plants pulled out. 



The second method used is similar to the first, excepting that clons 

 are used instead of inbred seed. By this method, when a type grown in 

 test rows from inbred seed is seen to come trae to seed and represents 

 practically a fixed race, good plants, typical of the type, arc selected from 

 the test rows and dug up at the proper time and the bulbs used in 

 planting an isolated plat in a rye field. Seed from these small isolated 

 plats will be produced in sufficient quantity to sow larger broadcast plats 

 from which still larger quantities of seed will be obtained. 



