THE SUGAR PRUNE 153 



This interesting and important change of 

 habit had been brought about, as the reader who 

 has perused the earlier chapters will surmise, by a 

 process of selecting, generation after generation, 

 the individual prunes that manifested a tendency 

 to early fruiting. But here as elsewhere we are 

 confronted with the question as to how it was 

 possible thus to change so markedly the habits of 

 a plant within a few generations. 



The answer carries us back, in imagination, 

 along lines we have followed in studying other 

 plant histories, to the remote ancestors of the 

 sugar prune. 



We are led to reflect that the time of fruiting 

 of a given plant is largely dependent upon the 

 climate in which the plant habitually grows. Now 

 there must have been ancestors of the prune that 

 grew far to the north, for the plum is a hardy 

 plant. Among some of the remote and now 

 untraceable ancestral strains there were doubt- 

 less some that produced their fruit at least as 

 early as the first of August, perhaps even earlier. 



And although (when interbreeding occurred) 

 the hereditary tendency to early fruiting had 

 been made subordinate to the late-fruiting tend- 

 encies of other races of plums that had grown in 

 milder climates, yet the potentialities of early 

 fruiting were never altogether lost. 



