104 STUDIES IN INDIAN SUGARCANE SEEDLINGS 



difficulty, and yet any success in such correlation will obviously he of the 

 greatest assistance in the early selection of new and better canes for cultiva- 

 tion. An enormous amount of labour is now being devoted to work of this 

 kind, especially in the United States of America, where, among many other 

 plants, apple trees are minutely studied in the seedling stages to try and find 

 early indications of good new varieties. The work of cane-breeding, as com- 

 pared with that of most other plants, is characterized by its extreme slowness, 

 and any means of quickening its progress will be of great value. To grow a 

 seedling cane from seed to maturity and to analyse its juice takes up the best 

 part of two years. It is even then impossible to gauge its idtimate value, as 

 it is necessary to cultivate it for several successive seasons before the natural 

 vigour of the seedling has abated and its true growth character is understoc d, 

 so that it can be put out for further trial on a crop scale in the fields. Such 

 is the experience gained after a quarter of a century of work in this direction, 

 and any attempt at shortening the period of testing is subject to the danger 

 of distributing unsuitable varieties, and thus raising doubts as to the advan- 

 tages to be gained by this method of improving the industry. 



Comparisons are often made between the relative progress in the improve- 

 ment of sugarcanes and sugar beets by the selection of seedlings. We must, 

 however, at the outset, bear in mind that, while the beet was practically a 

 wild plant as regards sugar content a hundred years ago, selection in the cane 

 for sugar extends to the remotest past. It is an unfortunate fact that, 

 despite the enormous number of cane seedlings raised, we have not made any 

 marked progress in our search for canes with richer juice which are at the same 

 time profitable in cultivation. The average sugar content of the canes culti- 

 vated is not appreciably greater than it was before the first seedlings were 

 raised. The great forward strides made in the industry by the introduction 

 of seedling canes have been rather in the direction of obtaining sound canes 

 yielding a certain crop, one less liable to the ups and downs caused by weather 

 and disease. The former, time-honoured, method of selection was slow and 

 sure, but it was eminently successful, and it may take us many years before 

 we can emulate it by producing such magnificent canes as the Bourbon and 

 Cheribon, guaranteed to maintain their high qualities for the best part of a 

 century. With the crop assured, however, immense advances have also been 

 made possible in the directions of management, machinery and cultivation. In 

 the sugar beet, the quantity of sugar in the roots has been enormously increased 

 by a system of suitable selection. But it takes little thought to see that the 

 conditions of the two rivals, apart from their history, are intrinsically different, 



