C. A. BARBER 105 



With a rapidly inaturiiig and heavily seeding plant like the beet, selection work 

 among seedlings is a very different thing from that possible in the sugarcane, 

 which rarely flowers and takes so long to mature its seed and adapt itself to 

 field cultivation. Anything like progressive selection is ruled out at once. If 

 we could guarantee that every seedling would flower and produce seed in due 

 course, progress would be as certain as in the beet, although perhaps a good 

 deal slower. But, unfortunately, it happens that, once a seedling of value is 

 obtained, it is a matter of considerable doubt whether it will ever flower and. 

 if it does, whether the fli)weis will ho fertile, and further ini])rovement alon^ 

 this line is checked. We are. so to speak, confined to a series of first steps in 

 progress. The sugarcane has, however, one advantage, namelv, in its reqe- 

 fnfire reproduction. Once a better variety is obtained, it can be reproduced 

 with a fair jnomise of its maintaining its good qualities. Even here, it has 

 been shown that deterioration may soon set in and that the length of useful 

 life in good, new seedlings is limited. ^ Summing up our comparison, in the 

 cane, as contrasted with the beet, it is far more difficult to obtain improvement 

 by seed selection, but. once it is obtained, it is easier to maintain it ; all of 

 which brings it home afresh that it is of the first impr)rtance to quicken the 

 process of selection. 



On pondering over a fresh batch of seedlings, there is nothing to indicate 

 the character which will be assumed at maturity. The quality of the juice 

 is also completely masked and, even at crop time, we are quite in the dark, 

 before cutting the cane, as to what amount of sugar it will be found to contain. 

 It has, indeed, too often happened that an apparently ideal .seedling, erect, 

 free-growing and healthy, has turned out to have such poor juice that it would 

 be profitless to grow it further, whereas a struggling and badly shajied plant 

 may, on analysis, show excellent juice, awakening the suspicion that vigour 

 and richness are conversely related. It appears as if there is but one wav, 

 in the absence of the intuition of a Burbank, in which to attack this problem — 

 the correlation of infant morphological characters with ultimate value. 

 Firstly, it is necessary to make a full study of the characters of seedlings at 

 maturity and, after analysis of the juice, to compare these characters indivi- 

 dually with the quality of this juice, on the chance of obtaining some corre- 

 lation between them. For in.stance, to determine whether the width of the 

 leaf in any batch of seedlings is correlated with the amount of sucrose in the 

 juice, the average leaf width of each seedling must be obtained by .suitable 



I Harrison, Stockdale and Ward. Sugarcane Experiments in British Guiana. Wesi 

 Indian Bulletin. XIII. 2, 1912. 



