THE HYBRID TYPES 321 



the two are not generally distinguished. These varie- 

 ties are early and productive, and where the winters 

 are not too severe, or when the bushes are laid down 

 in winter, they are satisfactory and profitable. Some 

 six or seven years ago a curious plant was noticed in 

 a patch of Wilson Early belonging to John Ster- 

 ling, Benton Harbor, Mich., where this variety is 

 now extensively grown. This plant was almost com- 

 pletely thornless, and the leaves were broad and 

 rounded. It was, no doubt, simply a seedling of the 

 Wilson Early. It is now called the Sterling Thornless 

 blackberry. The latest addition to this group of 

 blackberries is the Rathbun (Figs. 68, 69), which 

 originated with Alvin F. Rathbun, Smith's Mills, 

 Chautauqua county, N. Y., and which was intro- 

 duced to the trade bj" James Vick's Sons, in 1894. 

 This has a habit of rooting very freely from the tips, 

 and the fruit-cluster is very loose, with usually long 

 fruit-stems. It is the widest departure from the high- 

 bush type of any cultivated blackberry which I have 

 seen. 



What is the origin of these loose -cluster black- 

 berries? Horticulturists have said that they are 

 hybrids between the common blackberry and the dew- 

 berry, but botanists have not investigated them, and 

 they have not admitted hybrids between these very 

 unlike species. But the horticulturists are right. In 

 1867, Fuller thought that "it is probably a sport of 

 the trailing blackberry [dewberry], or a cross between 

 it and the high -bush." These hybrids of the black- 

 berry and the dewberry are common enough in central 

 New York, although a positive statement that such 

 natural hybrids do exist appears not to have been made 



