10 



THE ESSENTIALS OF AGRICULTURE 



Mr. Ephraim Bull. A chance seedling from this vagabond 

 sowing was preserved by him, and when it fruited, three years 

 later, Mr. Bull sowed the seeds of its only cluster of fruit. 

 Nine years after the accidental sowing, one of the second 

 generation of seedlings proved to be so far superior to all of 

 the others (Fig. 7) that the rest were destroyed, and the 



survivor became the 

 Concord grape. This 

 example illustrates 

 how a cultivated plant 

 may originate from 

 a wild one. 



11. The Bin-bank 

 potato. One day in 

 the decade begin- 

 ning in 1870 Luther 

 Burbank, who was 

 then a young man in 

 Lancaster, Massachu- 

 setts, working in his 

 market garden, found 

 a single seed ball on 

 a plant in a field of 

 Early Rose potatoes. 

 He saved the seeds, 

 and planted them, 

 and there grew a seed- 

 ling which yielded 

 tubers of unusual size 

 and quality. Thus he found the potato which bears his name, and 

 which has added millions of dollars to the products of agriculture. 

 12. Improvement by systematic selection. In walking through 

 the fields of grain near his native village in Scotland, Patrick 

 Shirreff in the year 1819 happened upon what seemed to be 

 an exceptional wheat plant, bearing on sixty-three heads some 

 twenty-five hundred kernels. The seeds from the plant were 



FIG. 7. The Concord grape (at right), and its 

 parent (at left) 



