RACES ASD TYPES OF SUGAR BEETS. 51 



ed? Some growers alternate between Germany, 

 France, Belgium and Holland, in which countries the 

 climates differ. The mothers are carried in boxes, 

 keeping them so that they will not be bruised. Under 

 these conditions there are constantly new varieties cre- 

 ated, and the question becomes so complicated that 

 the original types are lost sight of. 



However, with certain care, satisiactory results 

 may be obtained; in some of our early writings we 

 suggested what might be accomplished in the United 

 States by importing beets from Germany, after hav- 

 ing selected a suitable soil for their planting. This 

 plan seemed preferable to that of sending seed to a 

 foreign clime and then bringing back the resulting 

 beets to their native soil for their second year's growth. 

 We can hardly agree with Walkhoff, who proposes to 

 improve the quality of a beet by sending it or the seed 

 from a warm to a colder latitude. In conclusion, we 

 would say that for many years an idea continued to 

 prevail that the best way to obtain superior beets was 

 by a careful system of preparing the soil, by the use of 

 special fertilizers, etc. 



\\'hile all these may be, in their way, very essen- 

 tial, they are of secondary importance when compared 

 with the necessity of sowing superior seed from the 

 start, and without which careful agricultural methods 

 are of little avail. However, upon the same soil and 

 imder exactly the same conditions, there is an enor- 

 mous variation in the sugar percentage; this may be 7 

 per cent, on the one hand and 19 per cent, on the other. 

 The explanation of this is simply, that while every seed 

 has a tendency to resemble its nearest parent, yet, at the 

 same time, as explained in the foregoing, it has a cer- 

 tain affinity for an ancestor, more or less distant, and 

 this retrograde ata\-ism declares itself when least 

 expected, when in the hands of a novice who uses seed 

 obtained from dealers that make claims which mislead 



