Wheat Breeding in Canada. 31 



in the field and in the baking laboratory, and has been proved to 

 be genuine Red Fife in all essential respects. It ripens earlier 

 and shows certain other minor points of difference, but would 

 be generally recognised as Red Fife. This wheat has now been 

 grown for six years at Ottawa and was tested during the present , 

 season at Brandon also ; it is a strong grower and promises well. 

 Its advantage in earliness over common Red Fife is only a few 

 days under ordinary conditions ; by no means sufficient to meet 

 the needs of all districts, but quite enough to establish its value 

 and to create a large demand for it. It has been named Early 

 Red Fife, and will, it is expected, be available for general 

 distribution in small quantities after the next harvest. 



It would be quite in accord with popular ideas if we were to 

 carry on repeated selections of Early Red Fife for earliness 

 through several years or decades, in the hope of obtaining still 

 further advances in that direction. Unfortunately there are good 

 grounds for believing that the further advances would " tease the 

 patience of the centuries " before any striking results would be 

 obtained. Early Red Fife did not, in all probability, acquire its 

 earliness by degrees but at one step, at the same time as its other 

 points of difference from the parent variety were manifested. 

 In introducing this variety I do not claim that I have improved 

 Red Fife wheat, but that I have discovered and isolated an 

 improved type which had previously been mixed with the ordinary 

 form. It is from cross-breeding followed by selection that one 

 may expect the greatest advances in the direction of any desired 

 change ; and it is to cross-bred varieties therefore that we must 

 look for still earlier wheats of high baking strength. 



We may now turn to some of the observations of a scientific 

 character which have been made during the progress of this work. 



In regard to the inheritance of awns I wish merely to repeat 

 my view that awns and the absence of awns do not necessarily 

 form a pair of Mendelian unit characters, but that an intermediate 

 condition is quite common (in wheats of cross-bred origin) in the 

 first generation and also in succeeding generations. It has 

 been asserted that strength and weakness of flour form a pair 

 of Mendelian unit characters. Even after making all djue 

 allowance for the necessarily somewhat indefinite meaning of the 

 words strong and weak, the writer finds it impossible to accept 

 this view. (See Journal of Agricultural Science, vol. iii., p. 218.) 



Among other irregularities in inheritance, two may be mentioned 

 which occur so frequently as to suggest that they may perhaps 

 be regularities after all. When two varieties of wheat having 

 reddish bran are crossed, it often occurs that in the second and 

 later generations some of the progeny have yellowish bran. In 

 regard to awns a somewhat similar phenomenon is often observed, 



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