CHAPTER 3. 

 PLANT BREEDING. 



Many people imagine that the new and improved forms of garden and 

 field plants that are brought out by our enterprising seedsmen are the result 

 of some sort of magical hocus pocus of crossing or hybridizing, and think 

 that by taking two plants that have characters we wish to combine we can, 

 by crossing them, at once obtain the combined character we want. The fact 

 is, that crossing simply gives us a starting point from which, by long and 

 careful selection towards an ideal plant we may have in mind, we may finally 

 reach a point near what we aimed at. The new varieties introduced by the 

 seedsmen, when they are really new and valuable, are the result of long years 

 of careful selection through which hereditary characters have been formed 

 that may be expected to be permanent in the offspring. The . writer once 

 attempted the development of a variety of sugar corn that would have stamina 

 enough for the Southern climate. As a starting point, a cross was made 

 of the Learning, a Western field corn of a yellow color, on the Mammoth 

 sugar, a large eared, late sugar corn of a white color. The first result of the 

 cross was to cut the plant loose from its inherited character, and the ears came 

 sprinkled all over with white wrinkled grains, yellow wrinkled grains, white 

 dent grains and yellow dent grains. We assumed that the yellow wrinkled 

 grains were the ones that inherited the characters of both parents. Therefore 

 we selected only these for planting. The next season there was a larger pro- 

 portion of grains that had this character, and they were produced on a plant 

 of a sturdy, yet short habit and just the style of plant we were aiming at. The 

 process of selection was carried on year after year in a location where the 

 plants could not be affected by pollen from any other corn. But it required 

 seven years of careful selection before we could establish the heredity that 

 caused the plant uniformly to make yellow wrinkled grains all over the ears. 



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