140 



of maturity was the only sign, and selections of the richest canes can 

 not be made by that. 



When the sugar-beet growers attempted to improve the sugar beet 

 they met with the same difficulty. They were well aware that the heredi- 

 tary principles which are known to apply to animals also apply to 

 plants. They knew that the individual beets which actually contained 

 more sugar than the others should be saved for planting. But the char- 

 acteristic points of beets which are rich in sugar vary, so that they are 

 not reliable guides in selecting beets for seed. Knauer invented a ma- 

 chine which separated beets in piles according to their weigh t, in order 

 to select the heaviest, not the largest, beets for seed. And beets were 

 placed in a solution of salt-water of a certain density ; the beets which 

 sank were saved for seed. These methods were only adapted to rough 

 selections. To Vilmorin is due the credit of introducing the methods 

 by which the sugar-beet has been so wonderfully improved. He ob- 

 served that a cylindrical piece could be taken from each beet without 

 iojury to the plant. These sample pieces were separately tested to de- 

 termine their value in sugar manufacture, and only the beets which 

 were proved to contain more sugar than the others were saved for seed. 

 To show the zeal with which the work of improving the sugar-beet 

 was done, it is only necessary to say that at the Paris Exposition of 

 1878 there were twenty exhibitors who claimed to have produced im- 

 proved varieties of the beet. Deprez et Fils of France had an agri- 

 cultural laboratory with facilities for making 2,000 analyses of beets 

 daily. With the assistance of Professor Yiollette they produced three 

 important new varieties of the sugar-beet, which are known as u Im- 

 proved Deprez," 1, 2, and 3. 



It is evident that the sorghum industry should profit by this experi- 

 ence of the beet industry, and that sorghum seed should be saved only 

 from individual canes which yield well in sugar. 



ADVANTAGES POSSESSED BY SORGHUM OVER OTHER SUGAR-PRO- 

 DUCING PLANTS IN THE SELECTION OF SEED. 



Sorghum has advantages over both the sugar cane and the sugar- 

 beet in selecting seed from the best individuals, and it can reasonably 

 be expected that its improvement could be made much more rapidly 

 than has been the case with the former. In the first place the sugar- 

 beet is a biennial plant, requiring two years to produce its seed; sor- 

 ghum is an annual, requiring but one year to mature its seed, so that its 

 progress should be twice as rapid; then the sorghum is unique among 

 sugar-producing plants in that its seed may be separated entirely from 

 the cane and the latter analyzed, giving exactly the worth of the indi- 

 vidual which produced the seed, without injury to the seed itself. This 

 is a vast improvement over the tedious method that must be pursued 

 with the beet, of cutting out a portion of the root for the purpose of 

 analysis. Such a cylinder can not represent the quality of the whole 

 root with entire accuracy, and there is ground for supposing that it 



