INFLUENCE OF HEREDITY 111 



I had been raising potato seedlings for amuse- 

 ment at Lancaster, Mass., in 1862 and 1863, but 

 all the potato seedlings which I had raised had 

 so generally almost exactly resembled the parent 

 plants that I had given up the effort to produce 

 anything of special value from any of the com- 

 mon varieties. 



No one, up to the present time, as far as we 

 have learned, has ever seen a seed ball on the 

 Early Rose potato, except myself, and for years 

 I had a standing offer of five dollars per fruit 

 for anyone who would furnish me another from 

 the thousands of acres which were raised of this 

 variety at that time. 



iThis seed ball attracted my attention from 

 knowing that the Early Rose did not bear seeds 

 and it was watched patiently from the time it 

 first formed on the vine vmtil it was nearly ripe. 



When one day I went to examine it, as I did 

 often, it had disappeared and every effort to find 

 it for a time failed, but at last it was discovered 

 a short distance from the plant where perhaps 

 a bird, a dog, or some other passing animal had 

 brushed it from the vine. 



Although I was raised on my father's two-^ 

 hundred^acre farm — a large one for New Eng- 

 land — and began my experiments there, yet my 

 own little twenty-acre farm in an adjoining town 



