LUTHER BURBANK 
seedling, a good many things about the quality of 
the fruit it will subsequently bear. Utilizing this 
knowledge, we pass along the row of seedlings 
and select from among the thousand or five thou- 
sand individuals the ten or twelve that seem to 
us to give greatest promise. Nor at this particular 
stage of the development is the selection very diffi- 
cult, for the first generation hybrids usually show 
no very great tendency to variation. That ten- 
dency is revealed in subsequent generations, as 
we have seen. 
In point of fact, as a moment's reflection will 
tell us, the seedlings before us are really all of one 
quality as regards the particular characteristic of 
their innate tendency to bear large or small fruit. 
One of their parents bore large fruit; the other 
bore smali fruit. If, then, we assume that here, as 
in many other cases of plant breeding, the quality 
of largeness is dominant to the quality of small- 
ness, it may be expected that all the hybrids of 
the first generation will tend to bear large fruit. 
If, introducing our convenient system of sym- 
bols, we designate the dominant quality of big- 
ness with the letter B, and the recessive quality 
of smallness with b, we may designate the mem- 
bers of the hybrid generation as all being mixed 
dominants, each bearing the factors Bb. This 
means that the factor B dominates the factor b, 
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