ON THE AMARYLLIS 



old. So in making an analogy between the breed- 

 ing of a giant amaryllis and the breeding of a giant 

 man, it is necessary to bear in mind that ten gen- 

 erations of the amaryllis are compassed in the 

 span of a single human generation. 



In other words, the plant developer may log- 

 ically hope to produce with his amaryllis, in a 

 period of twenty-five years, a development com- 

 parable to that which the royal breeder of giants 

 could hope to have duplicated only in the reign 

 of some successor, perhaps of another dynasty, 

 250 years later. 



It has taken at least ten generations of hybrid- 

 izing and selection to produce my giant amaryllis. 



So we may assume that if the project of the 

 Prussian king, which was inaugurated about the 

 middle of the eighteenth century, had been sys- 

 tematically followed up by his successors, there 

 might be a possibility that a ten-foot giant would 

 have appeared among the descendants of the giant 

 guardsmen about the year 2,000 A. D. 



We may add, however, that it would probably 

 have been necessary to extend the search for 

 giants, to breed into the strain of royal guardsmen, 

 far beyond the bounds of Prussia. 



Reasoning still from plant analogies, we may 

 assume that the full measure of possible develop- 

 ment in the direction of the ten-foot giant would 



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