MODIFIED FORM OF THE MALE TREE 
The Correae type, shown at the left, is essential a male tree which has a few flowers capable of 
bearing fruit. 
The long stems on which the fruits hang are a typical feature. 
At the right 
are shown staminate (male) flowers, one of which has been cut open to show its structure. 
(Fig. 11.) 
Furthermore, the difficulty is increased 
by the fact that papaya trees usually 
degenerate after a few years. At least 
pistillate trees usually fail to produce 
good fruit after a few years of growth, 
although they may continue to produce 
indifferent fruit for many years. There- 
fore, even if the inherent characters of 
the male or staminate tree could be 
determined with reasonable accuracy, 
before any such determination could be 
made the tree would have become too 
old to be in a reliable state of virility if 
it degenerates as rapidly as the pistillate 
tree. 
Propagation by grafting will aid in 
overcoming this difficulty, but it appears 
reasonable to suppose that the process of 
producing a stable variety of good 
quality by the use of this dioecious type 
would be extremely long and tedious. 
The hope, therefore, must lie in the use 
of a hermaphrodite type. Here it is 
possible to select an individual of known 
qualities. This may be used as the sole 
parent stock or may be combined with 
another parent of known qualities. 
What mixtures there may be in the 
individual at the start may not be 
known; but through repeated selections 
and the elimination of undesirable 
characters, it should be possible to 
produce a reasonably pure strain, pro- 
vided, of course, that the stock is kept 
pure by constantly avoiding cross- 
pollinations with plants of different 
characters, a process which is necessary 
in all plants reproduced by seed and 
whose flowers are subject to accidental 
cross-pollination. 
A further practical difficulty in the 
use of the dioecious type, from the 
standpoint of the papaya grower, as 
well as the breeder, is the fact that a 
very large proportion of the trees from 
any given lot of seed are likely to be 
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