86 VEGETABLE GARDENING 



a plant otherwise defective. For instance, Livingstone, who 

 has done much to improve the tomato, selected seed for 

 fifteen years from the best tomatoes that approached 

 most nearly in size and other qualities the best modern 

 tomatoes, without noting much improvement. He says, 

 "I was then no nearer the goal than when I started. Such 

 stock seed would reproduce every trace of their ancestry; 

 viz., thin-fleshedj rough, undesirable fruits." It finally 

 occurred to him to select from the special merits of the 

 plants as a whole instead of from the best fruits without 

 regard to the plants on which they grow. Improvement 

 then came easily and rapidly, and in a few years he obtained 

 the Paragon, Acme, and Perfection, varieties which were 

 vastly superior to, and which have entirely supplanted, the 

 old varieties of tomatoes. Again, in selecting seed corn it 

 is more important to save seed from plants having ears 

 approaching the desired size of cob, kernel, etc., rather 

 than to select the largest kernels alone or to select from 

 ears after they have been pulled. 



When it is desired to hasten the ripening period of a 

 variety, only the seed from the earliest maturing specimens from 

 a plant having the largest number of early specimens should 

 be planted. In order to fix late maturing qualities, seed should 

 be saved from the late maturing fruits on plants possessing 

 these features to the greatest extent. 



The continued selection of any seed from inferior speci- 

 mens results in the fixing of the poorer qualities even more 

 surely than the selection of seed from the better plants results in 

 improvement. By judicious selection the cabbage has 

 sometimes been changed from a biennial to an annual 

 producing no head at all but going to seed the first year. 

 When cabbage has been grown for several generations 

 from stem sprouts and not from head sprouts the effect 



