CHAPTER XVII 



THE REMARKABLE IMPROVEMENT MADE IN PLANTS 

 BY MAN, AND THE WAY HE BRINGS IT ABOUT 



Plant Breeding 



N all the wide range of relations existing between plants 

 and mankind, there is not another single fact which 

 compares in importance with this, that plants can be 

 altered by man to make them fit better his needs or his 

 fancy. His accomplishments in this field, indeed, partake of the 

 marvelous. Everybody knows the magnificent exhibition type 

 of Chrysanthemum, with its superb great globular head of snowy 

 incurving petals, well-nigh geometrical in the perfection of its 

 symmetry. But does everyone know that it has been created by 

 man out of two daisy-like plants smaller and humbler than the 

 commonest weed of our hayfields? Likewise, all those strongly 

 individualistic types of the same noble flower, the prim little 

 pompon, the star-like anemone, the stiffly-correct reflex, the 

 shaggy Japanese, and a number of others, a few of which are 

 shown clustered together upon the accompanying plate (fig- 

 ure 174), have all been differentiated from the same unpromising 

 beginning. Again, the Bartlett Pear, huge and luscious, has been 

 developed within three hundred years from a small stony fruit 

 attractive to no one except vagabonds and omnivorous small 

 boys. Indian Corn and Wheat, chief of the food plants of civilized 

 man, have been improved so far from the simple wild grasses with 

 which the first cultivators had to begin, that Botanists are hardly 

 yet fully agreed as to what those wild ancestors were. Oranges, 



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