LUTHER BURBANK 



stoneless plum. We discover soon that the stone 

 seed is prepotent or dominant, and stonelessness 

 latent or recessive. So we must be prepared to 

 see the progeny of our first generation of hybrids 

 all produce stony fruit. But a knowledge of 

 the tendency of latent or recessive characters to 

 reappear in successive generations comes to our 

 aid, and we go on with the experiment with full 

 confidence, even though for the moment we seem 

 to be going backward rather than forward. 



In due course the second generation of plums 

 appears with a number of stoneless specimens, the 

 latent character having come to the surface. But 

 these lack many of the good qualities that our 

 perfected fruit must have, and in order to breed 

 these qualities into the stock we must make a new 

 cross; and this will involve the breeding in again 

 of the tendency to bear stone fruit. 



So in three generations we shall find ourselves, 

 as regards the essential quality of the stony seed, 

 somewhat further back than we were in the 

 beginning. 



But, on the other hand, our third generation 

 fruit, even though it has a stony seed, has qualities 

 of flesh that its stoneless ancestor altogether 

 lacked; and in the fourth generation we shall be 

 prepared to find individual seedlings that bear 

 stoneless fruit of greatly improved quality. 



[110] 



