LUTHER BURBANK 



well equipped experiment stations engaged in the 



work of raising and testing sugar-cane seedlings. 



APPLYING THE NEW KNOWLEDGE 



The reader will at once recall the case of the 

 Burbank potato, which is in all respects compar- 

 able. There, also, a plant that ordinarily does not 

 produce seed was found by exception to be fertile, 

 and the plants grown from the seed showed the 

 widest departure from the form of the parent 

 plant, and constituted the progenitors of a new 

 and improved variety. 



The obvious explanation is that the seeds owed 

 their existence to the union of two plant strains, 

 one represented by the pollenate and the other by 

 the pistillate flower, that must necessarily be some- 

 what divergent. The bringing together of the two 

 racial strains results, as we have seen illustrated 

 over and over, in the giving of renewed vigor or 

 vitality to the off-spring, and in the production of 

 variation through the new assorting and recom- 

 bination of characters, some of which may have 

 been latent and unrevealed in one or both parents. 



In the case of the sugar-cane, propagation by 

 cuttings had been the universal custom with the 

 planters for no one knows how many generations. 



As a result, a single cultivated variety of cane 

 that chanced to be in existence when the practice 

 of propagation by cutting was established contin- 



[140] 



