108 HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY OF NEW YORK. 



widely in the inflorescence and grains, and seeming to revert to the parent 

 types. 



In the work of oat breeding the idea is to get oat varieties that surpass 

 in some certain combination of qualities any other variety at present in exist- 

 ence, and all the methods known to breeders will be used to reach these 

 results. The addition of new varieties without any superior merit over our 

 present forms must be regarded as a mere waste of time. 



William Saunders: I decline to accept the parentage of the Big Four oats. They 

 originated with John A. Salisbury, of Wisconsin, and any one who has read Mr. 

 Salisbury's work would know that they might expect anything preposterous from such a 

 source. We have only had those oats in cultivation two years, and during that time I 

 am quite sure we have never sent a kernel of it to anybody. We should, however, 

 have been glad to have sent to the department, if we had known any such 

 work was in progress, some of the results of our work during the past ten or 

 twelve years. We have been working on the oat, and the results have been re- 

 ported every year in the annual reports of our farms, which are supplied liberally 

 to the department, to the libraries, and to all the officers who care to have them. We 

 have been going over many of the lines that Professor Norton has indicated as those that 

 he proposed to follow in the next few years. We have originated probably forty or fifty 

 crosses, which have been brought down by selection to about twenty or thirty. in our 

 crosses we have crossed the white oat and the black oat, using the Black Tartarian as 

 one sex and the white oat for the other sex, and we have produced oats white, dun 

 colored and black, all from the same cross; and by selection and breeding, any particular 

 feature in connection with those varieties can be perpetuated and the oat made a distinct 

 and permanent variety. Our experiments began about the same time as Mr. Carton's, to 

 which reference has been made, and have been widely published, and I am really surprised 

 that Mr. Norton has never heard of the work that has been going on in Canada, seeing 

 that we print our publications and distribute them so profusely anywhere throughout the 

 world, and many copies are sent to the United States. Now we have crossed the branch- 

 ing oat with the sided oat, and we have produced half-sided oats and sided oats and 

 branching oats, all from the same parents. We have also crossed thin skinned oats with 

 thick skinned oats, with the idea of trying to produce thinner skinned varieties. All 

 these have been reported on from year to year I think for the past twelve years pretty 

 fully, and at the same time we have carried on a large amount of work in the selection of 

 oats. We have obtained varieties from all parts of the world, growing them side by side 

 with these cross-fertilized forms, so that we might ascertain their actual value, and I 

 should be very pleased to send Mr. Norton samples of any or all of these cross bred that 

 he might like to include in his work; and I regret that I did not know that Mr. Norton 

 was carrying on work in this line, or I should have been glad to volunteer material and 

 information. 



D. G. Fairchild: It does not seem quite fair in reviewing the really remarkable 

 work of the Swedish investigators to overlook the, to me, very interesting contribution of 

 Dr. Nilsson, of Sweden, who has been carrying on experiments with oats for the past 

 ten years, and he and his predecessors have really done some very remarkable work. Of 

 course, their publications have been in Swedish, but no mention has been made of this 

 work of Dr. Nilsson and his predecessors. I had the pleasure of looking over his very 

 interesting station in Sweden several years ago, shortly after the Garton brothers had 

 inaugurated their experiments, and several points were made clear to me regarding the 

 work which have not been brought out here in these meetings. In connection with his 

 work on barleys, he discovered a means of very easily determining the purity of the seed 

 as regards variety. He divided the barley up into different strains which had characters 

 that appeared on the seeds, so that he was able not only to determine the actual purity 

 as it is generally done by means of seeds, but he could tell whether certain botanical 

 strains of barley were mixed in a certain sample. This had to me a very material prac- 

 tical value. The barley, as you know, is used almost exclusively for brewing purposes, 

 and uniformity is as valuable a character in it as anything else. He found a, correlation 

 of characters, that is to say, correlated with certain seed characters were certain qualities 



