RELATION OF BIOLOGY TO AGRICULTURE 543 



continue the valuable labors of best breeders, and the most gifted 

 workers with plants and animals have been unable to impart to others 

 the equipment with which they entered into their work. Their suc- 

 cessors have been drawn from such men as possessed similar natural 

 endowments and who happened to be so placed as to be encouraged to 

 utilize their qualifications in the betterment of plants or animals, and 

 plants and animals comprise all the objects and instruments of the 

 agriculturist. 



The Possibilities of Better Breeding 

 In our present solicitous and mercenary interest in agriculture, it 

 is not needful to explain the desirability of in any way adding to the 

 value and amount of the plant and animal products now coming from 

 our farms. One paragraph from Mr. Burbank will suffice : 



It would not be difficult for one man to breed a new rye, wheat, barley, oats 

 or rice, which would produce one grain more to each head, or a corn which 

 would produce an extra kernel to each ear, another potato to each plant, or an 

 apple, plum, orange or nut to each tree. What would be the result? In five 

 staples, only, in the United States alone, the inexhaustible forces of nature 

 would produce annually, without effort and without cost, 5,200,000 extra 

 bushels of corn, 15,000,000 extra bushels of wheat, 20,000,000 extra bushels of 

 oats, 1,500,000 extra bushels of barley and 21,000,000 extra bushels of potatoes. 



Even more striking increases would be the result of an increase of 

 one per cent, in the amount of human food that our animals now yield 

 from the plants produced for them. 



The past ten years have greatly changed the relation of biology to 

 agriculture. One cause of that change was the growing need of special 

 varieties of animals, and more particularly of plants, with such new 

 combinations of characters as would especially adapt them to the eco- 

 nomic needs of localities of peculiar conditions. Another factor was 

 the great desirability of putting the subject of breeding into a more 

 definite and scientific and teachable form than it had previously had. 

 But the chief cause of the new era, dating from 1900, was the announce- 

 ment of the wonderful truth embodied in what we know as Mendel's law. 



Mendel's Law and the Influence of its Discovery 



Mendel had finished his research and published his very striking 

 results in 1865, when the world was too much engrossed with the Dar- 

 winian idea to take any serious interest in data derived from a few crops 

 of sweet peas grown in a cloister yard by an Austrian monk. 



In 1900, de Vries, of Amsterdam, and Correns, in France, working 

 independently of each other and in ignorance of Mendel's paper, came 

 to the same conclusion as had the pious monk of thirty-five years before, 

 who, in thus having his name associated with his rediscovered findings, 

 was more fortunate than some other scientists who have lived before 

 their time. 



