larger or basal end. These little sack-like bodies or “baby seeds” 
as you might call them, later develop into real seeds, but only 
after a great many things have happened. 
Let us follow up the beginning of a seed and see just what 
these preliminaries to becoming a real seed are. First a tiny 
speck of pollen dust is brought by wind, insect or other agency 
to the sticky surface of the pistil. Nurtured by the sweet sugary 
substance there, it starts to grow by sending out a long colorless 
tube. The tube grows down through the long stem-like pistil 
until it reaches the region of the little sack-like bodies, whereupon 
it is attracted to the opening of one of them and enters, discharg- 
ing two tiny colorless male bodies called sperms . One of these 
little snake-like sperms unites with the egg, and the resulting 
mixture of egg and sperm grows into the first stage of the new 
plant or embryo, as it is usually termed. The other sperm unites 
with two other tiny bits of jelly-like substance, somewhat similar 
to the egg, and gives rise to the greater part of the starchy sub- 
stance of the seeds — the food that keeps the tiny plant alive until 
it gets its roots in the soil and makes its own food. The walls of 
each sack eventually become the walls of the seed, or the seed 
coat. Both the embryo and the starchy mass of food cells grow 
and produce more and more cells until the seed finally attains 
maturity, or, as we say, “gets ripe”, a stage in a plantlet’s life 
history somewhat comparable to the stage in our own lives when 
we are ready to be born. 
Now suppose you wished to cross a white Easter-lily with a 
red lily, how would you proceed ? That depends altogether on 
whether you are working for scientific as well as for practical re- 
sults or for practical results alone. The former method is theone 
by which we have secured most of our knowledge of the laws of 
heredity, while the latter is the method common for two hundred 
years or more to those working for practical results. The first is 
the more careful method of those greatest of all hydridizers, 
Mendel and DeVries. The latter is the method of the host of 
practical breeders. By the method of Mendel one is able to secure 
the same results twice, because every step is carefully recorded; 
by the method of the practical men, knowledge of the material 
and of the method by which they secured their results is largely 
guesswork. 
In plant-breeding work of a scientific nature, extreme care 
should be taken in selecting the kinds of plants on which to 
work out a problem. Some plants, such as peas, mature three 
generations a year; others, such as most of our fruit trees, give 
us a generation that matures fruit in two to twelve years. Some 
plants have large flowers, which bear rough handling and mutila- 
tion without much resentment; other plants bear small or deli- 
