BREEDING WHEATS FOR ENGLAND. 375 
Strength and weakness, then, form what Mendel would have spoken of 
as a “pair of more or less’ characters. Nevertheless, indefinite as they © 
may seem, it is essential, if improvements in this crop are to be made, that 
their inheritance should be studied in some detail. During the last five 
years this part of the problem has been receiving considerable attention, 
and the broad outlines of the story have been traced. Numbers of 
typically strong wheats, known te retain this characteristic, have been 
crossed with our English varieties, and the story has been followed out 
from generation to generation. One such case may be taken as typical of 
many. The strong parent was Fife, a wheat largely grown in Canada; 
the other an old English variety with many good features, known as 
Rough Chaff. Besides differing in the quality of* their endosperm, they 
differ in many other characters, but for the present endcsperms only need 
be considered. The grains obtained as the result of the operation of 
crossing were rather shrivelled, and no statement can consequently be 
made as to their character. On sowing, they gave hybrid plants in which 
the grain was strong; judging by eye they appeared to be as strong as the 
parent Fife. There were no grains of the opposite character, showing 
that in this case the seed characters do not segregate in the expected 
generation. In the next generation, though individuals were produced 
with either strong or weak endosperms, a statistical examination showed 
that there were three of the former type to one of the latter, and a further 
separation into the colours corresponding to the red of Fife and the white 
of Rough Chaff gave the ratio of nine strong red, three strong white, 
three weak red to one weak white. Judging from the appearance of the 
strong and weak types, there seemed to be no question that the one series 
was as strong as Fife, the other on a par with Rough Chaff. 
Confirmatory evidence was obtained by sending samples of the strong 
red and the weak white to the chairman of the Home-Grown Wheat 
Committee. The origin of the grain was not stated. He identified one 
sample as Fife, the other as Rough Chaff. In other words, the hybrids 
appeared to be identical in grain character with the parents. After this, 
there could be no doubt that strong and weak segregate from one another, 
and that, intangible as these characters may appear to many, and variable 
as they are under changing conditions of climate and cultivation, still 
they can be handled with the same definiteness as beards and no beards 
or rough and smooth chaff. In the following generation fixed forms of 
these types were isolated, and now field plots are being grown to test the 
matter further in the mill and bakehouse. 
Since then many crosses between strong and weak wheats have been 
made, and though complications have been met with in certain cases, no 
facts have been found which tend to invalidate the conclusions arrived at 
from these first experiments. 
At the same time these results have been checked in certain cases by 
estimating the percentage of nitrogen present in the grain, and the figures 
obtained point to the segregation of high and low nitrogen contents. 
The drawbacks to many of these strong foreign wheats are their 
excessive liability to the attacks of yellow rust (Puccinia glumarum) and 
the weakness of their straw. In the majority of them the straw is thin 
and reed-like, and it does not give sufficient bulk per acre to suit the 
