346 Ever-sporting Varieties 



showed some increase of the anomaly, but not to 

 a very remarkable degree. In the flowering pe- 

 riod I selected four plants with the largest num- 

 ber of quaternate and quinate leaves and de- 

 stroyed all the others. I counted in the average 

 25 anomalous organs on each of them. From 

 their seed I raised the third generation of my 

 culture in the year 1891. 



This generation included some 300 plants, on 

 which above 8000 leaves were counted. More 

 than 1000 were quaternate or quinate, the ter- 

 nate leaves being still in the majority. But the 

 experiment clearly showed that ' * four-leaved ' ' 

 clovers may be produced in any desired quan- 

 tity, provided that the seed of the variety is 

 available. In the summer only three, four and 

 five leaflets on one stalk were seen, but towards 

 the fall, and after the selection of the best in- 

 dividuals, this number increased and came up 

 to six and seven in some rare instances. 



The selection in this year was by no means 

 easy. Nearly all the individuals produced at 

 least some quaternate leaves, and thereby 

 showed the variety to be quite pure. I counted 

 the abnormal organs on a large group of the 

 best plants, and selected 20 excellent speci- 

 mens from them, with more than one-third of 

 all their leaves changed in the desired manner. 



Having brought my race up to this point, I 



