262 



Plant-Breeding 



fully three thousand varieties and forms as profitless. 

 This only means that he is a most astute judge of beans, 

 and that he knows when any type is likely to prove to be 

 a poor breeder. 



The bean also affords an excellent example of the care 



which it is generally 

 necessary to exercise to 

 keep any variety true to 

 the type. The person of 

 whom we have spoken, 

 in common with all care- 

 ful seed-growers, searches 

 his field with great pains 

 to discover the " rogues," 

 or those plants which 

 vary perceptibly from 

 the type of the given 

 variety. The rogue may 

 be a variation in size or 

 habit of plant, season of 

 maturity, color or form 

 of pods, productiveness, 

 susceptibility to rust, or 

 other aberrance. In the 

 dwarf or bush beans, 

 which are now most exclusively grown, the most fre- 

 quent rogue is a climbing or half-climbing plant. This 

 is a reversion to the ancestral type of the bean, which 

 was no doubt a twining plant. This rogue is always 

 destroyed even though it may be, itself, a good bean. 

 In some cases, the men who perform the roguing are 



FIG. 74. Japanese anemone chrys- 

 anthemum when fully expanded. 



