CHAPTER VII. 



NEW VARIETIES 



WHILE new creations in agriculture give promise of 

 enormously enriching the race and throw open the 

 door to an unlimited vista of speculation, new varieties in 

 agriculture are equally promising, and scarcely less inter- 

 esting. Within large limits varieties and species alike are 

 now known to be subject to human control ; both may be the 

 product of similar processes of manipulation, just as old 

 varieties and age-established species are the product of nat- 

 ural selection. As a matter of fact, new human creations in 

 the plant world are nothing more than varieties which have 

 been intentionally pushed beyond the semblance of their for- 

 mer characteristics ; while the new varieties, of which we 

 would now speak, are new creations which still retain in great 

 measure their ancestral form and quality. 



Throughout an inconceivable stretch of time Nature has 

 continued to create varieties, a comparative few of which she 

 has pushed on into species. By tremendous geological up- 

 heavals by Titanic physical phenomena: by flood and glacier 

 and cataclysm, by the sum total of all the actions that have 

 gone to change the climate and soil of localities, sections and 

 regions, and by all the myriads of subordinate and minute mu- 

 tations which she has ever exercised has she carried forward 

 the work which has resulted in the production of an innu- 

 merable variety of plant and animal life. But the more direct 

 and immediate means which she has applied to this end are 



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