478 ANNUAL. REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



PROF. HUNT: Mr. Chairman and Members of the Board of Agri- 

 culture: It was my privilege and pleasure to be a resident of your 

 State for one year, and I am pleased to be back here again. 



Prof. Hunt then read his paper xs follows: 



BREEDING CEREALS. 



Ct Thomas F. hunt, Professor of Agronomy, Cornell University, Ithaca, N. T. 



The Invprovement of Seed : A recent book opens with this phrase: 

 'The whole business of agriculture is founded upon the soil." The 

 sentence is completed with the statement: "For the soil the farmer 

 pays rent, and upon his pkill in making use of its inherent qualities 

 depends the return he gets for his crop." Suppose the author of the 

 book should plant wild crab apple trees upon the best land for the 

 purpose in the world, would he market Baldwin apples? Would it 

 not make a great ditierence in the return he would get from his land 

 whether he ottered the New York or London markets, crab apples, 

 Northern Spy, King, or even Ben Davis? Would the difference 

 inhere in the soil? At the Cornell Experiment Station last season, 

 on similar soil we raised sugar beets containing 27.1 per cent, of dry 

 matter, and yielding 12.75 tons per acre; mangels containing 1U.4 

 per cent", of dry matter and yielding as high as 43.75 tons per acre. 

 The sugar beet grows almost entirely under ground, the long-shaped 

 mangel wurzels are from one-half to one-third above ground, vhile 

 in the globe mangel, from two-thirds to three-fifths of the root is 

 above the ground. The long-shaped varieties of mangels are from 

 three to four times as long as broad, and there are all sorts of 

 graduations until we come to the globe mangel, which is spherical 

 or nearly so. The color of the skin of these different forms of beets 

 were white, pink, red, orange and purple. There was almost as 

 much variation in the color of the flesh. These are but a few of the 

 most striking variations to be found in dillerent varieties of mangel 

 wurzels, and sugar beets, all of which have descended from the com- 

 mon red garden beet. Similar illustrations are to be f oui i on every 

 hand. The florist mixes one part of sand, one part of rotted manure, 

 and three x>arts of rotted sod together, and in this mixture raises 

 chrysanthemums of bewildering forms and colors. W^hy these dif- 

 ferences? None of the differences herein noted were inherent in 

 the soil. They inhered in the seed. Packed away in cells requiring 

 a microscope to distinguish is the spark which causes a man to be 

 black or white, Indian corn, yellow or white, the apple, sweet or sour. 



The Forces of Heredity: It is a well-known fact that the hand- 

 writipg of a son at thirty-five may be in some cases almost identical 

 with that of his father when te was thirty-five, notwithstanding 

 the fact that when the child was in school the teacher labored, and 

 may have surceeded, in teaching him the Spencerian hand. Did 



