4 



THE PRODUCTION OF NEW VARIETIES OF FRUIT. 



We are not sure that the vegetable physiologists will undertake to 

 answer this query fully. But in the mean time we can throw some light 

 on the subject. 



It will be remembered that our garden varieties of fruits are not 

 natural forms. They are the artificial productions of our culture. They 

 have always a tendency to improve, but they have also another and a 

 stronger tendency to return to a natural or wild state. " There can be 

 no doubt," says Dr. Lindley, "that if the arts of cultivation were 

 abandoned for only a few years, all the annual varieties of plants in our 

 gardens would disappear and be replaced by a few original wild forms." 

 Between these two tendencies, therefore, the one derived from nature, 

 and the other impressed by culture, it is easily seen how little likely is 

 the progeny of varieties always to reappear in the same form. 



Again, our American farmers, who raise a number of kinds of Indian 

 corn, very well know that, if they wish to keep the sorts distinct, they 

 must grow them in different fields. Without this precaution they find, 

 on planting the seeds produced on the yellow-corn plants, that they have 

 the next season a progeny not of yellow corn alone, but composed of 

 every color and size, yellow, white, and black, large and small, upon the 

 farm. Now many of the varieties of fruit-trees have a similar power of 

 intermixing with each other while in blossom by the dust or pollen of 

 their flowers, carried through the air by the action of bees and other 

 causes. It will readily occur to the reader, in considering this fact, what 

 an influence our custom of planting the different varieties of plum or of 

 cherry together in a garden or orchard must have upon the constancy of 

 habit in the seedlings of such fruits. 



But there is still another reason for this habit, so perplexing to the 

 novice, who, having tasted a luscious fruit, plants, watches, and rears its 

 seedling, to find it, perhaps, wholly different in most respects. This is 

 the influence of grafting. Among the great number of seedling fruits 

 produced in the United States, there is found occasionally a variety, per- 

 haps a plum or a peach, which will nearly always reproduce itself from 

 seed. From some fortunate circumstances in its origin, unknown to us, 

 this sort, in becoming improved, still retains strongly this habit of the 

 natural or wild form, and its seeds produce the same. We can call to 

 mind several examples of this ; fine fruit-trees whose seeds have estab- 

 lished the reputation in the neighborhood of fidelity to the sort. But 

 when a graft is taken from one of these trees, and placed upon another 

 stock, this grafted tree is found to lose its singular power of producing 

 the same by seed, and becomes like all other worked trees. The stock 

 exercises some, as yet, unexplained power in dissolving the strong natu- 

 ral habit of the variety, and becomes, like its fellows, subject to the laws 

 of its artificial life.* 



When we desire to raise new varieties of fruit, the common practice 



* The doctrine here advanced has perhaps no foundation in fact, nor has there 

 been any test made that, to our knowledge, would controvert it. Observation 

 of many years, however, leads to the belief that the mere engrafting a variety 

 upon another stock in no way affects its habit or capacity for reproducing itself 

 just the same as it would if retained upon its parent root. The great vitality 

 possessed by some varieties, their strong character, &c, prevent them, as it 

 were, from, receiving impregnation while in flower from any less vigorous sort, 

 and hence, as a strong variety is oftener than otherwise surrounded by those of 

 less vitality, it mainly f ertilizes itself from its own blossoms and thus reproduces 

 its leading qualities. 



