LECTURES AND ESSAYS. 433 



varieties, or hybridizing between species will make the tendency still more 

 apparent. In short, the greater the diversity between these characters in 

 parents, or in more remote ancestors, the greater will be the tendency of the 

 offspring to variation. The offspring of a crossed plant may show the char- 

 acter of either parent, of both parents, or of neither; it may by reversion or 

 atavism exhibit the preponderant character of great-grandparents or of still 

 more remote ancestors. On the other hand the offspring of plants that have 

 been bred in and in for several generations, where the parents have been 

 selected for similarity of characters, tend to reproduce the characters of the 

 parents, and where this is persisted in for a long enough time, the characters 

 become fixed, and are reproduced in each succeeding generation. 



Now, our most valuable cultivated plants have been developed in particu- 

 lar directions ; in the direction of certain characters which made them valu- 

 able to man. High cultivation and constant selection have changed them 

 greatly from the wild types. The valuable characters have become abnor- 

 mal, and it is in these abnormal characters that we have exhibited the 

 tendency to variation. 



Plants cultivated for their seeds show little or no tendency to variation in 

 foliage, and plants cultivated for their leaves do not vary in the direction of 

 the seed they produce. All of our particularly fine varieties of wheat, corn, 

 oats, potatoes, cabbage and other vegetables have reached their present state 

 of perfection, not by accident, but by careful and intelligent design. The 

 originators may have started with a cross or a hybrid, followed up by careful 

 selection, or they may have commenced by selection alone, and persisted in 

 it until the ideal type was reached. 



The more perfect, in our eyes, these varieties are, the more abnormal they 

 are, the farther are they removed from the original type; and the greater 

 the abnormal development, the greater is the tendency to atavism, or rever- 

 sion to the original from which they have descended. Hence the necessity 

 of constant care in order that the high development reached may be main- 

 tained and perpetuated in succeeding generations. In the ordinary farm 

 practice this care is not exercised, and deterioration, the natural result of 

 relaxed care, follows. That we may understand something of what has 

 been accomplished in the improvement of varieties by selection of seed, I 

 wish to notice briefly two or three well authenticated instances: Taking first 

 the experiments of Mr. Hallet, of Brighton, England. 



HALLET PEDIGREE WHEAT. 



The " Hallet Pedigree Wheat " has become matter of history. His experi- 

 ments have been quoted again and again in agricultural books and journals. 

 To many of you they may be familiar, but for the benefit of any who may 

 not be acquainted with them, I desire to review his work and the conclu- 

 sions he reached : 



From a study of the principles of selection as applied to the breeding of 

 animals, Mr. Hallet became convinced that the same principles could be 

 applied to plants. Of wheat he observes that "starting with an accidentally 

 large ear is a very different thing from starting with a similar ear the result 

 of descent or pedigree. Take the case of two heifers, identical in every 

 respect but pedigree. The one what she is by accident, the other by design. 

 From the former you may get any imaginable kind of progeny, from the 



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