198 MAKING BETTER PLANTS 



III. HEREDITY AND VARIATION: AND THEIR PLACE 

 IN PLANT BREEDING 



143. Nature, too, breeds new varieties of plants, and she has 

 been in the business much longer than man has. For 

 countless centuries she has been developing the myriad 

 kinds of plants that we know from a smaller number of 

 simpler forms. Doubtless even more myriads were started, 

 but failed to survive. 



144. Nature and the Human Plant Breeder. Nature is still 

 at work in the same way ; and still, too, when she pro- 

 duces a plant fit to become the mother of a new variety, 

 it often dies out without doing so, or loses its best quali- 

 ties by unfortunate crosses. The human plant breeder, 

 and indeed the ordinary farmer, sometimes stumbles upon 

 a new sort of plant that Nature has just produced unaided. 

 If the plant is useful, the man's part is merely to protect it 

 and to propagate a new race of plants from it. 



This is what the youthful Burbank did with his famous 

 potato. He had some other special merit in that case, 

 however. He noticed a possibility of merit when a less 

 observant man would have seen none at all ; and he took 

 the trouble and time to try out the plant and prove its 

 value. Other men have sometimes made like discoveries 

 more purely as a result of chance, so far as their own merit 

 is concerned. A famous instance of such a discovery is 

 described in the next paragraph. 



145. The Concord Grape. In 1843 Ephraim W. Bull 

 planted in his yard at Concord, Massachusetts, a few seeds 

 of the wild fox grape. The grape whose seeds he planted 

 was not unusually attractive to the sense of taste, or sight, 

 or smell. He had no reason to suppose that from these 

 seeds he would obtain a vine which would bear any more 

 attractive grapes. Indeed, he expected to secure only 



