PATIENCE REWARDED 289 



the most part, in such a line of experiment 

 theory and practice necessarily go together. 



The only sharp distinction between our method 

 and that of an experimenter who is looking only 

 to the investigation of the laws of heredity is that 

 we were obliged to select for preservation a few 

 only among large companies of hybrid seedlings, 

 destroying the rest, and to that extent making 

 the record incomplete. It would be of great 

 scientific interest to trace the entire company of 

 a hybrid stock as to all its individual members 

 through successive generations. 



But when the members of a fraternity number 

 ten or a hundred thousand or a million, as was 

 often the case in our experiments, the attempt 

 to preserve all and to investigate their progeny 

 through several generations would necessitate 

 the expansion of our experiment farm until it 

 comprised thousands of acres, and the employ- 

 ment of an army of helpers. 



If this is true of the plants of a single series 

 of experiments, what shall we say of the aggre- 

 gate companies making up the ranks of plants 

 involved in two or three thousand experiments. 

 So soon as our work was well under way, and 

 throughout all the succeeding years, at least 

 three thousand different series of experiments 

 have been carried forward simultaneously. 



J Bur. Vol. 8 



