CORRELATIONS BETWEEN MORPHOLOGICAL CHARAC- 
TERS AND THE SACCHARINE CONTENT 
OF SUGAR BEETS 
Frederick J. Pritchard 
In nearly every line of plant or animal improvement, the breeder 
strives to attain an ideal type which, from study and experience, is 
known to be correlated with desirable qualities. As long as selection 
towards an ideal type is confined to characters which bear the de- 
sired qualities as constituent elements, as, for instance, size, length 
and tensile strength of cotton or woolen fiber, this practice appears to 
be sound. Often, however, in forming the ideal type, a distinction is 
also made between characters which do not bear the qualities sought, 
but which are supposed to have a fundamental connection with their 
development. Before making distinctions between characters of the 
latter class it would seem desirable to ascertain (i) what the relative 
merits of the mutually exclusive characters of the organism are with 
respect to its quality and productiveness and (2) whether highest 
quality and maximum production are really dependent upon a par- 
ticular combination of such characters. The present investigation is 
directed along these lines, but is limited to a study of the sugar beet. 
Material 
All the material, except that used in computing the biometrical 
constants for table II, consisted of five American varieties of sugar 
beets grown by the Ofiice of Sugar Plant Investigations, at Brookings, 
South Dakota, in 1910, in co-operation with the South Dakota Ex- 
periment Station. About an equal number of beets were taken at 
random from each variety to compile the data. 
The chemical analyses were made by Guy Youngberg, under the 
direction of James H. Shepard, station chemist. 
Investigation 
The correlations which obtain between mutually exclusive char- 
acters of the sugar beet plant and its percentage or quantity of sugar 
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