CHAPTER VIII 

 HOW DOMESTIC VARIETIES ORIGINATE 



"THE key is man's power of accumulative selection: 

 nature gives successive variations; man adds them up 

 in certain directions useful to him." This, in Darwin's 

 phrase, is the essence of the cultivator's skill in ameliorat- 

 ing the vegetable kingdom. So far as man is concerned, 

 the origin of the initial variation is largely chance, but 

 this start or variation once given, he has the power, in 

 most cases, to perpetuate it and to modify its characters. 

 There, then, are two very different factors or problems 

 in the origination of garden varieties, the production 

 of the first departure or variation, and the subsequent 

 breeding of it. Persons who give little thought to the 

 subject look upon variation as the end of their endeavors, 

 thinking that a form comes into being with all its char- 

 acters well marked and fixed. In reality, however, 

 variation may be but the beginning in the process ; selec- 

 tion is the end so far as the plant-breeder is concerned. 



Indeterminate varieties. There are two general classes 

 of garden varieties in respect to the method of their 

 origin, those that come into existence somewhat 

 suddenly and which require little else of the husband- 

 man than the multiplication of them, and those that 

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