14 THE ESSENTIALS OF AGRICULTURE 



the family first. We grow a great many separate families and 

 test their progeny. We compare these families for several years 

 in nursery rows, in small plots, and finally in the field, in order 

 to determine such matters as yield, earliness, winter-hardiness, 

 rust resistance, the hardness and milling quality of the grain, 

 and the baking quality of the flour. 



The above method, commonly known as the ear-row method, 

 was originated nearly a hundred years ago, but was forgotten. 

 In the meantime nearly all the plant breeders in Europe and 

 the United States sought to gain all their results by selecting 

 plants by regiments, until the method of taking them separately 

 as individuals was rediscovered. This is the process by which 

 the best families, or strains, are most quickly sorted out, and 

 is the method now followed in this country and in Europe 

 by nearly everyone who is trying to improve the standard of 

 agricultural plants. 



15. Making new varieties by crossing. The most important 

 method of plant improvement is the breeding, or actual creation, 

 of new kinds of plants. Selection creates nothing new. It 

 simply finds and uses the best of what already exists. Breeding 

 goes further and, through the crossing of favorable parent plants 

 and animals, produces new types of offspring. In 1865 a highly 

 important law of crossing, or hybridization, was discovered. This 

 law is of such importance that all of our modern scientific 

 knowledge of plant and animal breeding dates from the work of 

 the Austrian monk, Gregor Mendel, which was first published 

 in the reports of a scientific society of Briinn in Austria, but 

 which, strange to say, remained unknown to science until, in 

 1900, it was rediscovered almost simultaneously by three noted 

 European botanists. 1 



16. Mendel's Law. Mendel experimented with garden peas 

 and found that different kinds of peas differed in certain re- 

 spects when the plants were crossed. He found, among other 

 things, that peas differed in the color of the ripe seeds (whether 



1 Professor Hugo de Vries of Holland, Professor Erich Tschermak of 

 Austria, Professor Carl Correns of Germany. 



