268 Biology in America 



breeds it is possible to produce hornless cattle in breeds which 

 are usually horned. 



The "upland" cotton of the South has a short fiber which 

 is worth much less than the long fiber of the "sea island" 

 variety. The former however is a much better bearer than 

 the latter, and has a pod which opens widely, rendering the 

 cotton more easy to pick, while the latter is more easily ginned, 

 tlie fibres not adhering so tightly to the seeds. By crossing 

 "upland" and "sea island" plants, the U. S. Department of 

 Agriculture has produced a prolific race of "sea island" 

 cotton, with wide-opening bolls, thereby adding hundreds of 

 thousands, if not millions of dollars annually to the value 

 of the cotton crop in the United States. 



We are all familiar with the frequent alarms that come 

 from Florida to the effect that the orange crop is a failure 

 due to some recent freeze. And we can never be quite sure 

 whether the freeze is genuine, or faked for the purpose of 

 making us pay a premium for Florida's delicious fruit. Oft- 

 times however the danger to the orange grower is very real, 

 and many a sleepless night he spends tending the bonfires in 

 his groves to save his crop from ruin. And so the plant 

 breeder has come to his rescue and by crossing the hardy, 

 frost-resistant orange of Japan with the Florida orange, has 

 produced a fruit known as the citrange with many of the 

 good qualities of the orange and yet capable of resisting a 

 temperature as low as 8°F. 



These instances might be multiplied many-fold, but they 

 must suffice as a suggestion merely of the possibilities open 

 to the scientific breeder of the future. 



But in no direction has Mendelism better served than in the 

 development of the new science of eugenics, concerning which 

 we hear so much today, both of fact and fancy. The germ 

 of the eugenic idea is contained in the witticism of Oliver 

 Wendell Holmes, who, when asked for advice on how to reach 

 a good old age, replied that the best way was to select long- 

 lived grandparents. 



It is indeed true that, as Kimball says in his fascinating 

 essays on the "Romance of Evolution": "The scientific way 

 of selecting a wife and falling in love, going first to a phrenol- 

 ogist and getting a chart of her skull with all its bumps, com- 

 bativeness, destructiveness and the like marked upon it, then 

 to the physiologist to find out whether her temperament is 

 bilious or phlegmatic, then to the family physician to make 

 sure she is free from scrofula and consumption and then to 

 the woman herself to exchange, not vows but charts and cer- 

 tificates, is not certainly on the face of it quite so romantic 

 as where Arthur and Amelia fall in love with each other at 



