THE FOUNDERS OF 



THE ART OF BREEDING 



Herbert F. Roberts 

 Kansas State Agricultural College 



FIRST home of breeders OF PLANTS 



EXACTLY where or when men 

 first began to practice agricul- 

 ture, and to bring into cultiva- 

 tion and domestication the plants 

 and animals they found about them, no 

 one can tell. It is certain, however, 

 that one of the earliest homes of civil- 

 ized man upon earth was in the lower 

 basin of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers 

 in southwestern Asia, the site of the 

 biblical "Garden of Eden," known 

 locally today by the Arabic name of 

 "Iraq." 



From four to six thousand years 

 before our era, and at least fifteen hun- 

 dred years before the days of the Jew- 

 ish patriarch Abraham, this region was 

 occupied by an already ancient, orderly 

 and settled civilization, possessing cul- 

 tivated plants and domestic animals. 

 Indeed, there is little reason to doubt 

 that the low alluvial plain fed by the 

 "waters of Babylon" was the scene of 

 one of the very first of man's attempts 

 at the improvement of plants, for it is 

 known that, at the earliest time re- 

 corded in human history, the cultiva- 

 tion of the date palm was being carried 

 on in this region. 



DATE CULTURE IN ANCIENT BABYLONIA 

 AND ASSYRIA 



The history of the date palm typifies, 

 better than that of almost any other 

 plant, man's relation to the plant world 

 as a moulder of its cultivated forms. 

 The great extent of the culture of dates 

 in Mesopotamia in ancient times, is 

 made very plain to us from the many 

 luibylonian and Assyrian inscriptions. 

 The monuments of these ancient em- 

 pires show not only the methods of cul- 

 ture and the serving of the date as food, 

 but even the process of hand pollina- 

 tion (10). 



From the ruins of Nineveh there 

 comes, for example, an inscribed mon- 

 ument of Ashurbanipal, who lived about 

 650 B. C, king of Assyria at the zenith 

 of its power, the Sardanapalus of the 

 Greeks, and the "Grand Monarque" of 

 the ancient world. 



In this bas-relief he is represented 

 upon a couch in his garden. Over his 

 head stretch the loaded garlands of the 

 grape vine, while to the rear stands 

 a date palm laden with fruit. 



The tremendous economic value of 

 this remarkable tree, even in those early 

 times, is attested by a Babylonian hymn, 

 quoted by both Pliny and Strabo, which 

 recites three hundred and sixty uses for 

 the plant. As late as the thirteenth 

 century, the celebrated traveler, Marco 

 Polo, speaks of "a great city called 

 Bastra (modern Busreh) surrounded 

 by woods, in which grow the best dates 

 in the world." 



WHY MEN LEARNED PLANT BREEDING 

 FROM THE DATE PALM 



It had probably always been recog- 

 nized, since animals were first exten- 

 sively domesticated, that the fact of sex 

 lay at the basis of whatever improve- 

 ment in their characters man could 

 bring about, for the reason that, in ani- 

 mals, "breeding" has always meant the 

 use of superior animals (usually supe- 

 rior males) in crossing. In plants, how- 

 ever, the existence of sex is less evident 

 than in the case of animals, partly be- 

 cause of the fact that in most plants 

 the sexes are not separated. But in the 

 date palm, we have at once a plant of 

 supreme economic value in certain 

 regions, and one in which the sexes 

 exist separately as in all the higher 

 animals. Indeed it came to be recog- 

 nized, from the earliest times, that date 

 trees were of two kinds, sterile and 



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