176 Practical Farming 



to our needs. In the South it will be long-legged and 

 single-eared, and in the North may have characteristics 

 that make the plant undesirable and unproductive in 

 bushels per acre. What we need at the start is a proper 

 ideal of what, in our particular section, should be the ideal 

 corn plant. In the North, earhness is of prime import- 

 ance. Then we want prolificacy, and a stout, short- 

 jointed plant that bears its ears as near midway the stalk 

 as possible. Selecting by a score card in the barn will 

 never tell us anything about the plant on which the ear 

 was borne. It will never tell us what sort of plants sur- 

 rounded it and furnished to the pistils the pollen needed 

 for the perfection of the grain, and this sort of selection 

 tends to decreased productiveness since the pretty ear 

 selection will eventually result in the production of a 

 single ear on a plant. 



Heredity is one of the strongest forces in nature, and 

 the constant and long-continued selection toward a well- 

 considered ideal plant will gradually estabhsh a hereditary 

 tendency to come true to seed, as the saying is. That is, 

 we estabhsh a family or strain of common ancestry and 

 common inherited tendencies. 



Then, of course, it follows that the proper selection of 

 corn for seed must be made in the field by close attention 

 to the character of the whole plant during the entire sea- 

 son of growth. If we wish our pretty ear to become 

 fixed in its tendencies to reproduce such ears, we must 

 see that the plant does not get pollen from plants that 

 produce inferior ears. If we want to increase the number 

 of ears on the plant, and so increase the yield of the crop 

 per acre, we must see that the plants that have the pro- 



