LUTHER BURBANK 



seedling, a good many things about the quality of 

 the fruit it will subsequently bear. Utilizing this 

 knowledge, we pass along the row of seedlings 

 and select from among the thousand or five thou- 

 sand individuals the ten or twelve that seem to 

 us to give greatest promise. Nor at this particular 

 stage of the development is the selection very diffi- 

 cult, for the first generation hybrids usually show 

 no very great tendency to variation. That ten- 

 dency is revealed in subsequent generations, as 

 we have seen. 



In point of fact, as a moment's reflection will 

 tell us, the seedlings before us are really all of one 

 quality as regards the particular characteristic of 

 their innate tendency to bear large or small fruit. 

 One of their parents bore large fruit; the other 

 bore small fruit. If, then, we assume that here, as 

 in many other cases of plant breeding, the quality 

 of largeness is dominant to the quality of small- 

 ness, it may be expected that all the hybrids of 

 the first generation will tend to bear large fruit. 



If, introducing our convenient system of sym- 

 bols, we designate the dominant quality of big- 

 ness with the letter B, and the recessive quality 

 of smallness with b, we may designate the mem- 

 bers of the hybrid generation as all being mixed 

 dominants, each bearing the factors Bb. This 

 means that the factor B dominates the factor b, 



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