110 REVIEWS. 



plant exhibits little flexibility. To detect the earliest indica- 

 tions of sporting, and to select for the parents of the new race 

 those individuals which begin to vary in the requisite direc- 

 tion, is the part of the scientific cultivator. In this way, the 

 elder Vilmorin succeeded in producing the esculent carrot 

 from the wild stock in the course of three generations, — no 

 addition to our resources, indeed, but significant of what may 

 be done by art directed by science. By adopting and skill- 

 fully applying these principles, the younger Vilmorin has con- 

 ferred a benefit upon France which (if she will continue to 

 make sugar from the beet) may almost be compared with that 

 of causing two blades of grass to grow where only one grew 

 before, having, so to say, created a race of beets containing 

 twice as much sugar as their ancestors, and indicated the 

 practicability of its perpetuation. The mode of procedure, 

 and the ingenious methods he contrived for rapidly selecting 

 the most saccharine out of a whole crop of beets, as seed-bear- 

 ers for the next season, are detailed in these papers. 



Once originated, and established by selection and segrega- 

 tion for a few generations, the race becomes fixed and per- 

 petuable in cultivation, with proper care against intermixture, 

 in virtue of the most fundamental of organic laws, namely, 

 that the offspring shall inherit the characteristics of the 

 parent, — of which law that of the general permanence of 

 species is one of the consequences. The desideratum in the 

 production of a race is, how to initiate the deviation. The 

 divellent force, or idiosyncrasy, the source of that " infinite 

 variety in unity which characterizes the works of the Creator," 

 though ever active in aU organisms, is commonly limited in its 

 practical results to the production of those slighter differences 

 which ensure that no two descendants of the same parent 

 shall be just alike, being overborne by that opposite or centri- 

 petal force, whatever it be, which ensures the particular re- 

 semblance of offspring to parents. Now the latter force, as 

 ]VIr. Louis Vilmorin has well remarked, is really an aggrega- 

 tion of forces, composed of the individual attraction of a series 

 of ancestors, which we may regard as the attraction of tlie 

 type of the species, and which we perceive is generally all- 



