The Strange Story of the Flowers 



swept from off the earth every cereal used as 

 food. Professor Goodale, Professor Asa Gray's 



successor at Harvard University, lias so much 

 confidence in the experiment stations of An 

 that he deems them well able to repair the loss 

 we have imagined; within fifty years, he thinks, 

 from plants now uncultivated the task could be 

 accomplished. Among the men who have best 

 served the world by hastening nature's steps in 

 the improvement of flowers and fruits, stands 

 Mr. Vilmorin, of Paris. lie it was who in creat- 

 ing the sugar beet laid the foundation for one - >f 

 the chief industries of our time. One of his 

 rules is to select at first not the plant which 

 varies most in the direction he wishes, but the 

 plant that varies most in any direction whatever. 

 From it, from the instability of its very fibres, 

 its utter forgetfulness of ancestral trad' 

 he finds it easiest in the long run to obtain and 

 to establish the character he seeks of sweetness, 

 or size, or colour. 



Of flowering plants there are about 110,000, 

 of these the farmer and the gardener between 

 them have scarcely tamed and trained 1,00c. 

 "What new riches, therefore, may we not expect 

 from the culture of the future? Already in cer- 

 tain northern flower-pots the trillium, the blood- 

 root, the dog's-tooth violet, and the celandine 

 are abloom in May; as June advances, the wild 

 violet, the milkweed, tin- wild lily-of-the-valley, 

 unfold their petals; later in summer the 

 rose displays its charms and breathes its perfume. 

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