PLANT BREEDING 37 



intelligent plant breeder. The broom corn grower can increase the length 

 and quality of his brush and get it on a plant nearer within reach by careful 

 selection and the growing of a seed-stock by itself, for no permanent advance 

 can be made so long as the seed-stock is subject to disturbing influences around 

 it. We have been hearing a great deal of late years about the need for seed 

 testing under Government control, and our great Department of Agriculture 

 has, until recently, done a good deal of laboratory testing of seeds. While 

 this work has a certain value in the determining of the clean character of the 

 seeds and their germinating quality, it does not go far enough to determine 

 anything of real value to the cultivator. The wide awake gardener, farmer 

 or seed grower lays more stress upon the pedigree of the seed than upon the 

 mere matter of percentage of germination. Of course a fair percentage of 

 germinating power is essential in any seed that is to be planted, but the wise 

 cultivator will take seed of a lower germination test than another if he knows 

 that it has a better pedigree behind it. The laboratory germination test 

 proves nothing in this regard, and, in fact, would not show whether a certain 

 sample was cabbage seed or cauliflower or some other cruciferous 

 plant, or whether a certain sample of beets was an early or 

 late variety. All that the laboratory test proves is the per- 

 centage of pure seed free from trash and weeds there is in a 

 sample and the percentage of these seeds that will germinate. The only 

 real test of seeds is that practiced by the best seedsmen who run farms at 

 great expense, for the sole purpose of testing the seeds they sell, in the same 

 conditions that their customers must be under; and also by the workers in 

 the Experiment Stations in their variety trials. Intelligent seed growers 

 must of necessity understand the laws of nature under which all their at- 

 tempts at improvement must be carried out. It is an easy matter for the 

 gardener who is propagating plants from cuttings, buds, grafts and layers to 

 catch and make permanent a certain variation in his plants that may be 

 desirable, for he is simply reproducing that identical plant ; and he can retain 

 the variation at once and make it permanent, as I have shown, in the instance 

 of the rose grown from a sporting shoot, which at once makes a new variety 

 to be cut into thousands and put on new roots. But in the case of the plants 

 annually grown from seed there is a set of very different conditions. Plants 

 are infinitely variable, and the blossoms that are to form the seeds are 

 subject to infinite interference from insects, winds and the neighborhood of 

 other plants of the same species. Plants of a vigorous character are always 

 tending to break away from the line of their breeding, and if the grower 

 slack in his efforts, or loses sight of the ideal towards which he is selecting, 

 nature makes a reversion, and it may be towards an inferior type. Hence, as 



