ON THE REWARDS QF PATIENCE 



the point of view, we may say that the principle 

 of selection is the same in each case. 



And we are justified, I suppose, in saying that 

 the experiments in artificial selection made on my 

 experiment farms during the period under review, 

 constitute the most elaborate series of experi- 

 mental proofs of the truth of the Darwinian doc- 

 trine of Natural Selection that have ever been 

 brought forward. 



Such experiments in hybridizing and selection 

 as were part of the every-day work at Santa Rosa 

 and Sebastopol, season after season, involving 

 thousands of species, had been performed else- 

 where only in isolated cases and by rare excep- 

 tion. Nowhere else had such a work been under- 

 taken on a comprehensive scale even with a few 

 species of plants. 



The application of the method to thousands of 

 species, involving countless myriads of individ- 

 uals, was an absolute novelty. 



SCIENTIFIC RESULTS 



The results of the work in their bearings on 

 scientific theory may be briefly summarized. 



These experiments demonstrated that the bar- 

 riers between natural species are much more 

 fragile than had been almost universally supposed. 



They showed that not only may we produce 

 fertile hybrids between a very large number of 



[133] 



