444 MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



ment stations, amateurs and practical horticulturists and all others 

 who wish to take part, begin by crossing each kind with each of the 

 others. This will give twenty-eight combinations, the fruits of each 

 having a different pedigree. As soon as these bloom let the propa- 

 gator cross two varieties of the twenty-eight, then two more, till he 

 gets to the last. This would reduce the number from which selec- 

 tion would be made to fourteen. A repetition of this operation 

 would give but seven to propagate from. Continuing along the 

 same line the next time we should have three crosses and one odd 

 tree to cross with the best one already found. 



Before reaching this point, which would require forty years or 

 thereabouts, we should obtain some very good apples, and if long 

 keeping has been made a specialty in all the selections, there will, 

 doubtless, be a few good winter apples. Yet it must not be forgotten 

 that we are building for posterity and enjoying the work. 



What are the advantages of this method? The great trouble 

 with all seedlings of fruits which, by cultivation, have been raised 

 far above the normal level, is to "breed back" towards the normal 

 condition, getting their distinguishing characteristic from some an- 

 cestor or ancestors that stood lower in the scale than the specimen 

 which bore the seed that was planted. Plant a Wealthy seed and 

 try to forecast the future by "guessing" what the fruit will be. 

 The parents will in some way stamp their mark upon the offspring, 

 but the ancestors will have their influence too, and the four of the 

 second degree will exert as much as the parents themselves. Going 

 back one degree further we find eight ancestors which collectively 

 have as much potentiality as the four in the second degree, each one 

 standing one chance in eight of marking the new seedling with one 

 of its characters. At the tenth remove we find over a thousand an- 

 cestors back of this degree, and if 999 of them were summer apples 

 and one a long keeper, "breeding back" ten generations would have 

 one chance in a thousand to be a winter apple and then it would 

 probably be valueless, because so many of its ancestors were acrid, 

 bitter and of no account. In the plan proposed in this paper one 

 more cross would result in a single pair or set of parents, and a seed- 

 ling from them could not possibly have more than eight ancestors 

 in the sixth generation, all of which would be of a very high order, 

 while one raised in the usual way would have sixty-four. Proceed- 

 ing four degrees further by inbreeding from these two and their 

 offspring we shall reach a place where tracing the pedigree of an 

 apple back ten generations we still find but eight individuals of this 

 degree as against 1,024 of the seedlings had been produced in a hap- 

 hazard way. or by simply propagating from the best without adopting 



