THE BEST SEEDS PRODUCE THE BEST BEEEDS. 487 



of plants upon principle will be, then, by artificial means, to 

 bring the parent from which seed is to be saved as near as 

 possible to that state at which he desires the seedling to arrive. 

 It is known that the abstraction of fruit and flowers 

 augments the vigour of the branches, or of the parts connected 

 with them, and that the removal from the former of any part 

 which takes up a portion of the food employed in the support 

 of the flowers increases their ef&ciency. Thus those varieties 

 of the Potato, which will neither flower nor fruit otherwise, 

 may be made to do both by stopping the development of tubers ; 

 and, on the other hand, the size and weight of the tubers them- 

 selves are increased by preventing the formation of flowers and 

 fruit. The course, then, to take, in obtaining the largest 

 possible tubers in a new variety of the Potato, would be, in the 

 first place, to efiiect that end temporarily, but during several 

 successive seasons, by abstracting aU the flowers and fruit, and 

 by such other means as may suggest themselves ; and then to 

 obtain the most perfect seed possible by a destruction of the 

 tubers during the season when seed is finally to be saved. Mr. 

 Knight found, in raising new varieties of the Peach, that, when 

 one stone contained two seeds, the plants these afforded were 

 inferior to others. The largest seeds, obtained from the finest 

 fruit, and from that which ripens most perfectly and most early, 

 should always be selected {Hort. Trans., i. 39); and, in his 

 incessant efforts to obtain new varieties of fruit of other 

 genera, he had reason to conclude that the trees, from blossoms 

 and seeds of which it is proposed to propagate, should have 

 grown at least two years in mould of the best quality; that 

 during ^at period they should not be allowed to exhaust them- 

 selves by bearing any considerable crop of fruit ; and that the 

 wood of the preceding year should be thoroughly ripened (by 

 artificial heat when necessary) at an early period in the autumn ; 

 and, if early maturity in the fruit of the new seedling plant is 

 required, that the fruit. Within which the seed grows, should be 

 made to acquire maturity virithin as short a period as is con- 

 sistent with its attaining its fuU size and perfect flavour. Those 

 qualities ought also to be sought in the parent fruits, which are 

 desired in the offspring; and he found that the most perfect 



