This Is Dan Patch. He holds the fastest record of any harness horse In the world. He Is bred up 
from a long line of ideal ancestors that also hold fast records. With such skilful breeding by selection 
and with the assistance of a careful driver It has been made possible for Dan Patch to pace a mile In 
one minute, fltty-six and one fourth seconds. On account of his high breeding and speed combined. Mr. 
M. W. Savage, proprietor of the International Stock Food Co.. Minneapolis, Minnesota, paid the enormous 
sum of $60,000 for him; he is now valued at $150,000. Many of his colts bring $1,000 to $1,500 when one 
day old. What difference does the first cost make so long as his offspring pays a big dividend on the 
investment, beside winning all the big purses, never having lost a race? He only weighs 1,200 pounds: 
his owner was not buying common horse llesh at $50 per pound, but the pedigree, showing his gel was 
what placed the value. Size and weight Is a small consideration; minutes and seconds are what count. 
The great horsemen are now breeding to this wonderful speeder, paying fabulous prices, hoping to get 
something to still beat his record. It's just as impossible to win a big purse in the great horse races with 
a weak and poorly developed horse as it is to win bis purses In the great strawberry race with weak and 
poorly developed plants. 
transmitted with increased tendency in the 
same direction to the offspring. The early 
horticulturists believed that plant structure 
when propagated by buds and runners was 
fixed and that no change whatever 'occurred 
in succeeding generations. This thory was 
simply accepted without investigation until it 
was observed that fruit buds vary under selec- 
tion and restriction, resulting in new and vary- 
ing types or forms. "Nature makes no leap," 
is a canon which every fresh addition to our 
knowledge tends to confirm and yet under the 
skillful application of nature's laws new fruits 
are created and old varieties modified to adapt 
them to new conditions by means of which 
their qualities and desirabilities are improved. 
' The enthusiastic, successful fruit grower or 
farmer will be satisfied with nothing less than 
a knowledge of these laws, and to possess the 
art 'and skill necessary to make nature open 
to him her storehouses, for of more account 
than gold or silver are the harvests of fruit, 
flower, vegetable and grain in our gardens and 
fields. 
Two of the several purposes for which this 
booklet is written are briefly to give the reader 
the essential facts of plant life and plant breed- 
ing and also to give methods of cultivating the 
strawberry in order to grow the largest crops 
of big, red berries. 
SEX IN PLANTS. 
The natural instinct of all life is to perpetu- 
ate its kind. Flowering plants are male and 
female, sometimes having the organs of the 
two sexes in the same flower or plant, as in the 
bi-sexual strawberry, and on corn, and some- 
times on entirely different plants, as in hemp 
and willows. 
The seeds are the eggs of the plant and con- 
tain the two merged life germs kept in dor- 
mant state just as the germ in a bird's egg re- 
4 
