VARIANT TENDENCY IN VEGETABLES. 



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often v.here there could not have been pollen influence to induce the sport. 

 In most vegetables, if any new form, no matter how distinct from those com- 

 monly cultivated, appears in one stock and place, there is almost a certainty 

 that practically identical variations will appear elsewhere. For instance, the 

 Navy Blue Sweet Pea was a very new and distinct shade, and appeared in the 

 fields of two cultivators the same year, the only discernible difference in the 

 two sports being that the seed of one had a greater tendency to skin-crack than 

 that of the other. This tendency to sport into new forms developing in the 

 species rather than in any particular stock is often the cause of much annoy- 

 ance to seedsmen, two or more of them being accused of sending out a new 

 form under different names, when each supposed that he had the only origina- 

 tion of that type. 



4. The variant tendency in a race is common to different stocks and 

 peculiar to each season. 



For instance, in 1896, a distinct tendency to neckiness was noticed in 

 Long Green cucumber; this increased in 1897, when I found several plants, 

 all of the fruit of which more or less closely resembled that of the Summer 

 Crooknecked Squash in shape. This tendency then gradually disappeared, 

 giving place to one toward thicker fruit with white spines. 



5. Seed of the same stock and equally well grown, by the same culti- 

 vator, in the same location, differ in the variant tendency, and the degree to 

 which their product will be of the desired type in different seasons. The crop 

 of seed of Green Globe Savoy Cabbage produced by a certain grower in 1893 

 gave much more evenly typical plants and heads than any subsequent crop 

 produced by him of the same strain, though he took the greatest care in 

 selecting stock and growing the plants, even setting them in the same field 

 that gave the superior crop. I have known a practical seedsman, one not 

 likely to waste money on a mere theory, to pay treble the market price for a 

 certain strain of peas produced by him four years before, though he had an 

 abundance of seed of the same strain grown by himself in succeeding years — 

 none of these later crops giving such good results as seed of that particular 

 season. 



6. Seeds from individual plants of precisely the same pedigree grown 

 the same season in the same held and equally true to the desired type vary 

 in the degree to which their product will adhere to that type. I have gone 

 into a field of Beauty tomato, of which every plant was from seed of an ideal 

 plant selected the year before from a field similarly grown, and spent hours in 

 picking out five ideal plants, and succeeded in getting those so nearly equally 

 of the desired type that I could not distinguish one from the other; sowed 

 and planted the seed separately and found that the seed of one of these gave 

 fruit quite distinctly inferior to that of the general crop of seed; another 

 gave fruit much superior, while that of the others was intermediate in quality. 

 This is but one of scores of similar experiences which have convinced me that 

 the most certain, if not the only, way to secure a high degree of uniformity 

 and excellence in a race of vegetables is, first, to form a definite and distinct 

 idea of what the race should be; then by selection and testing, find not only 

 an ideal plant, but one of the greatest possible prepotency or ability to repro- 

 duce itself, and to multiply the descendants of this plant as rapidly as possible 



