CERTAIN GENERAL FEATURES 
lack of nourishing food and sunshine. Most 
of them have opportunity for blossoming 
out in luxurious beauty and abundance. A 
few are so fixed in their habits that it is 
better to select an individual for adoption 
and improvement from a race which is more 
pliable. This stability of character cannot 
often be known except by careful trial, there- 
fore members from several races at the same 
time may be selected with advantage; the 
most pliable and easily educated one will 
soon make the fact manifest by showing a 
tendency to ‘break’ or vary slightly or per- 
haps profoundly from the wild state. Any 
variation should be at once seized upon and 
numerous seedlings raised from this individ- 
ual. In the next generation one, or several, 
even more marked variations will be almost 
certain to appear; for, when a plant once 
wakes up to the new influences brought to 
bear upon it, the road is opened for endless 
improvement in all directions, and the ope- 
rator finds himself with a wealth of new forms 
which is almost as discouraging to select 
from as, in the first place, it was to induce 
the plant to vary in the least, —now comes 
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