OPINIONS OF EXPERTS. 35 



Mr, Thorp who disseminated many new varieties, says that 

 inbreeding with a batch of common blood seedlings is the quick- 

 est and surest way to obtain a definite and an individualized plant 

 and flower. 



Mr. Swayne, who has originated some good carnations, says 

 that vigor in a plant is obtained by using pollen from single flowers 

 and that such pollen will beget as many double flowering seedlings 

 as will pollen from the stamens of a double flower. 



The North Dakota agricultural station alleges that an excess 

 of food to plants is the cause of varieties. Food has no more to 

 do with the origin of varieties than maze fed to a mare has in be- 

 getting a mule. Varieties spring from opposite sexual forces 

 meeting and mingling in a conceptive cell. 



A thousand carnation seeds will scarcely produce two alike. 

 They will be single and double, erect and sprawling, monstros- 

 ities and models, strong and weak, late and early, perverts and 

 paragons, with colors and shades that shame the chromatic scale. 

 But this is not strange, since nature never obliterates progress 

 once made, but embalms vestiges of it in all succeeding struct- 

 ures, atrophies and carries them forever to the front. If man 

 could rightly read the hieroglyphs nature etches on her creations 

 he would find the data of an unfolding history in everything 

 from a worm to a world. Man carries in his mind and body vesti- 

 gral relics, habits and homologues of every plane of organization 

 and civilization through which he has ascended since Adam bit 

 the apple. 



The majestic harvester that kings the fields of golden grain 

 embodies all the mechanical appliances that have evolved for 

 gathering grain since Ruth gleaned the fields of Boaz. The pon- 

 derous locomotive that has continents for racecourses, with oceans 

 for boundaries, is an epitome of all the practical devices of apply- 

 ing steam as a motive power, since Watt saw the imprisoned 

 demon lift the lid of the boiling kettle. It is to these retained, 

 conflicting hereditary forces that carnations owe their erratic, ver- 

 satile and capricious nature. Vital vestiges and ancestral forces of 

 all the species from which it sprang are hidden as latent relics, in 



