174 Practical Farming 



for seed, but should take at the start the com that has been 

 long cultivated in that particular section, and through care- 

 ful selection, year after year, breed it to the ideal of what 

 we consider the plant should be. 



The great fault in what has been called com breeding 

 of late years has been the taking of the ear as an individual 

 unit for the starting point. The ear of com is a great 

 aggregation of individual fruits bome on a common recep- 

 tacle, the cob. Every fruit or grain is the result of the 

 impregnation of a separate pistillate or female flower by 

 the male element or pollen. The so-called silks consti- 

 tute the pistils or female part of the flower, and each pistil 

 is attached to an ovary in which are certain ovules that 

 are transformed into seed or grain when the pistil is im- 

 pregnated by the pollen. This pollen, or male element, is 

 produced in what is called the tassel. Those who have 

 noticed a solitary com plant growing at a distance from 

 any other corn plant have doubtless observed that it sel- 

 dom produces well-filled ears, because Httle of the fine 

 dust-Hke pollen falls directly on the protruding pistils, 

 or silks, but is blown away from it, and the silks that 

 receive no pollen fail to develop grain. 



But where a large number of com plants are growing 

 together the vast abundance of pollen blown about in all 

 directions in apparently wasteful abundance is pretty cer- 

 tain to reach all the silks, and the result is a full ear or 

 ears on each. We see, then, that the plant that produced 

 the grain is seldom the one that furnishes the pollen for the 

 perfection of the grain, but that the pollen from the thou- 

 sands of stalks around constitutes the male parent of the 

 grains on the ear. It is, therefore, perfectly possible that 



