224 ESSAYS ON WHEAT 



breeders who have devoted themselves to the production of 

 new wheats has been very limited until recently, while the 

 number of kinds of wheat in the world, the properties of 

 which require to be investigated and with which experi- 

 ments could be made, is very great. The wheat population 

 in a field of any common kind of wheat is usually a mixed 

 one and consists of a number of elementary varieties differ- 

 ing slightly from one another. ^^ Some of these are better 

 than the average and some worse. By careful selection ^"^ 

 of the best of them, any particular kind of wheat such as 

 Red Fife, Bluestem, or Marquis, can often be consider- 

 ably improved; and it was by the employment of this 

 method, either consciously or unconsciously, that the older 

 workers, Le Contour, Shirreff, and Hallett in England, 

 Eimpau in Germany, Nilsson in Sweden, and others, ob- 

 tained their many successes; and it was also by the em- 

 ployment of this method that Dawson of Ontario isolated 

 his Golden Chaff,^^ Haynes of North Dakota his Haynes 



96 Every kind of wheat seems to have a tendency to break up 

 spontaneously in the course of time into these elementary varieties; 

 but vphat the cause of this may be, we do not know. 



8'^ For an interesting discussion of the selection method as used by 

 the older improvers of cereals, see Hugo de Vries, Plant Breeding, 

 Chicago, 1907, pp. 29-90. 



98 According to Professor Zavitz of the Ontario Agricultural Col- 

 lege the wheat known as Dawson's Golden Chaff originated as fol- 

 lows: Robert Dawson, a farmer living near Paris, Ontario, had 

 a field of the White Clawson winter wheat in the year 1881, which 

 was badly lodged. In walking over the field, Mr. Dawson ob- 

 served a plant standing upright in the midst of the lodged grain. 

 He carefully saved this one plant and sowed the seed in the autumn. 

 In a comparatively short time he had sufficient seed, not only for 

 his own requirements, but also for sale to his neighbors. The 

 Dawson's Golden Chaff variety of winter wheat, which possesses 

 very stiff straw, has been grown more extensively throughout On- 

 tario than any other variety (Wheat and Rye, Bulletin No. 261, 

 Ontario Department of Agriculture, Toronto, 1918, p. 10). Plot 

 tests at Guelph with fourteen varieties of winter wheat for 22 

 years showed that Dawson's Golden Chaff gave an annual average 



