36 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



\yeak spindles were cut away from a considerable number ol 

 stalks on this eighth of an acre to which Capt. Moore has 

 alluded ; and supposing you cut out the suckers which will 

 sometimes come up, not to perfect ears, but to perfect their 

 spindles (you frequently see suckers coming up which spindle 

 out, and, although they cannot perfect ears, those spindles 

 from a sucker or a weak plant can fertilize the pistils of a 

 plant, so that, if the pollen from the spindles on a sucker 

 reached the germ, it would be the only pollen that would 

 fertilize that germ) ; supposing, I say, that you should cut 

 out all the weak plants, those that were unsatisfactory, that 

 failed to come up to jout idea so far as strength and vigor 

 and earliness were concerned ; supposing, also, you cut off 

 all the suckers, thus preventing them from spindling out, and 

 furnishing pollen, — there would still be sufficient plants left 

 to furnish pollen enough to fertilize all the ears that could be 

 grown on that eighth of an acre, and a million more ears ; 

 so that I do not think that the objection which Mr. Comins 

 has made to selecting seed-corn in that way is a valid one. 

 I am inclined to think that the method of selection sug- 

 gested by Capt. Moore is vastly superior, so far as the perfec- 

 tion of breeding is concerned, to the method pursued by Mr. 

 Comins. Mr. Comins is a successful farmer in the Connecti- 

 cut Valley, — a farmer who grows first-rate corn ; and he 

 says that his corn has improved from year to year. I have 

 no doubt of it. He has cultivated it intelligently and well. 

 But that does not prove that his method of selecting is so 

 good as the more careful and scientific method suggested by 

 Capt. Moore. If Mr. Comins should set apart a small por- 

 tion of his corn-field of five or ten acres, say an eighth or a 

 quarter of an acre, and take particular care to see that the 

 seeds on that eighth or quarter of an acre are bred in this 

 careful manner, I am inclined to think that he himself would 

 come to the conclusion, in five years, that he had reached a 

 better result than by his own method. The difficulty in 

 selecting seed at the time of husking is that you cannot tell 

 where the male fertilizing material has come from. Your 

 seed may, perhaps, be taken from an ear that was perfect; 

 but you do not know with any sort of certainty that the seed 

 from that ear is going to produce such an ear as the ear 

 from which it was taken. If it was fertilized by a strong 



