Miscellaneous. 



468 



I'May 1903. 



These products are simply the wild 

 plants taken out of the jungle and culti- 

 vated. The various different kinds of 

 rubber afford notable examples. It has 

 already been observed that Hevea brasi- 

 liensis is highly variable as regards the 

 yield of rubber obtained from individual 

 trees. Judging from the analogy of 

 temperate products, I think there can be 

 no doubt that, if seed is saved from the 

 best trees only, a very marked improve- 

 ment in the average yield would be the 

 result. And in the case of future plant- 

 ing, it will be perfectly possible to do 

 this now that large numbers of trees are 

 available for selection of seed. 



More than five years ago Dr. Willis 

 got me to come out to Ceylon to under- 

 take experiments in plant-breeding. My 

 appointment was for a short time only, 

 and I was obliged to confine my efforts 

 to minor products of rapid growth, and 

 also to choose characters more for their 

 obviousness than their utility. I was 

 able to show, however, what indeed 

 scarcely required showing, that plants 

 in this country were just as amenable 

 to the breeder's art as any of the pro- 

 ducts of temperate regions. And by 

 way of a practical achievement, I ob- 

 tained by crossing and selection a strain 

 of maize giving a decidedly higher yield 

 thau the native type, and not much infe- 

 rior in quality to the indented coi'ns of 

 America. This race never caught on, 

 for I was met by a difficulty, which this 

 Society would doubtless easily have 

 smoothed away for me if it had then 

 existed. The natives, noticing the slight 

 indentation at the ends of the grains, 

 supposed that they had not ripened 

 properly and maintained that they were 

 bad. The indentation, of course, is a 

 definite character of the strain, which 

 was really rather superior in quality to 

 the native kind, in addition to giving a 

 considerably larger yield of grain. 



These experiments were amongst the 

 first evar made in plant-breeding in a 

 tropical country, but many other coun- 

 tries have now followed suit, and Ceylon 

 is not even the first of the British 

 Dependencies to appoint a plant-breed- 

 ing expert as a definite officer. Nu- 

 merous experiments are being made in 

 India, and the Egyptian Government has 

 recently appointed a Biologist, whose 

 duty it is to confine his attention to 

 the purely scientific study of breeding 

 problems as they arise in the case of the 

 cotton plant. And everywhere it is the 

 same. It is no longer so much a question 

 of giving Ceylon a good start in the race 

 for improvement of its products, as of 

 endeavouring to keep pace with the im- 

 provements which are being made by 

 our competitors. 



And a further point has to be con- 

 sidered. Improved races of products in 

 different countries are not by any means 

 necessarily interchangeable. What is 

 good for one soil and climate may not 

 be at all suitable for another. So that 

 it will not do for us to rely upon simply 

 getting hold of other people's improve- 

 ments aud growing them here— they 

 would very likely be useless, even if 

 the other people would let us have them, 

 and experience teaches us that there 

 might be some difficulty about that. 

 On the other hand, there is this com- 

 pensation : that we need not greatly 

 fear that other people will steal our 

 new inventions aud so minimize the 

 advantages we may derive from them. 

 But what we have to do is to set about 

 making all the improvements we can 

 in our native strains of plants. 



Let me briefly recapitulate the line of 

 argument which I have been trying to 

 follow out. The fact that scientific me- 

 thods of breeding have never yet been 

 applied to the products of this country 

 should make us all the more hopeful of 

 getting marked improvement when such 

 methods are applied. We are now begin- 

 ning to know something about the 

 underlying principles of breeding, and 

 we can get all the improvement that is 

 possible in a comparatively small num- 

 ber of generations. We know that, 

 whilst our aucestors in temperate coun- 

 tries were in the main working along 

 the right lines, they might have got 

 the maximum possible improvement in 

 a much shoiter time, if they had known 

 as much as we do. The mere process of 

 cultivation effects something in the 

 way of improvement. It is said, too, 

 that cultivation causes the occurrence of 

 sports wich may be selected ; and im- 

 provement thus arrived at. But the chief 

 modern implement for plant improve- 

 ment is crossing followed by selection ; 

 and these processes are now rapidly 

 developing into a definite branch of 

 science. In my mind there is no kind of 

 doubt that the most promising branch 

 of scientific agriculture at the present 

 time consists in raising improved varie- 

 ties of existing native and introduced 

 products ; and doing it as far as possi- 

 ble in the place where these products 

 are intended to be grown. 



Do not think, because I speak strong- 

 ly, that you are going to get strains of 

 coffee, tobacco, coconuts, &c, immune 

 to all known diseases created for you 

 in a few years. We cannot create any- 

 thing. We can only pick out the novel- 

 ties which happen to turn up. These 

 we can breed from, and we can cross 

 them with the original parental form, 



