v.] SKETCH OF JOSEPH COOPER. 151 



gle lesson is worth all the arduous labor of his long and 

 useful life. This lesson has now been accepted as one 

 of the canons of horticultural teaching, and it has been 

 strengthened by the experience of every experimenter 

 and every careful cultivator, — that the one and the onlj' 

 infallible means of producing better plants is through 

 good care, and judicious and persistent selection. 



Joseph Cooper. 



Although Van Mons is the leading early apostle of 

 selection for the amelioration of plants, there were other 

 experimenters who had early demonstrated its value. 

 One of these early explorers in the field of plant -breed- 

 ing was Joseph Cooper, of Gloucester county. New Jer- 

 sey, who, at the close of last century, had made most 

 suggestive experiments in the improvement of plants, 

 and who apprehended the value of selection more clearly 

 than any other person of his time with whose work I 

 am acquainted. Unfortunately, Joseph Cooper appears 

 to be almost unknown and therefore I have the greater 

 pleasure in introducing him to his posterity ; although 

 he had been discovered by the patient search of Darwin, 

 who cites his work to show that selection may accom- 

 plish much when it ' ' has been silently carried on in 

 places where it would not have been expected." Dar- 

 win, however, did not know the particular paper and ex- 

 periments of Cooper's to which I am about to refer. 

 This paper is a short letter which was written in 1799, 

 and published in the first volume of the ' ' Memoirs of 

 the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture." 

 The title given it in the Memoirs is : " Change of seed 

 not necessary to prevent degeneracy; naturalization of 



