luloid cylinders, a little cotton, a small, smooth one-piece 
blade and handle knife, a spear-head needle, spring steel 
tweezers, price tags, and a bottle of 50 or 60 per cent alcohol. 
We select a half-grown bud, carefully remove its ten stamens 
by inserting the tweezers between the folded petals, or by 
cutting away some of the petals with our knife. We first make 
certain that the stamens are too young to shed their pollen, 
after which we carefully tag the flower with date of operation, 
clean our instruments and hands carefully with alcohol, and 
cover the flower just operated upon with a small, light, tough, 
square-bottomed manila bag, and tie it at the base. This keeps 
out pollen carried by the wind or by insects. In winter time, 
with peas in a greenhouse, this bagging is unnecessary. In a day 
or two, when the pistil is ready, we take off the bag, put some 
pollen from the unopened pollen bag of the plant that is to be the 
father upon the sticky brush-like pistil, cover the latter flower 
again with the bag, wash the knife or brush used in applying 
the pollen, and await the seed — the seed that may grow into 
plants that look exactly like the father or the mother, or, more 
likely, that look like both father and mother, or that resemble 
neither of the parents, nor of the ancestors of these parents back 
even unto the tenth generation. 
Now, the practical breeder would consider it a waste of time 
and patience to go through this tedious process described above. 
He must get results and get them quickly, for results bring 
money, and money brings inspiration and other good things. So 
he does not use paper bags, or alcohol, nor does he care to be 
absolutely certain of the father of his newly created variety. He 
makes his cross, sometimes not even removing the pollen bags of 
the flower he uses as a mother, though generally these are re- 
moved. He works rapidly, makes many crosses, and when the 
plants from his crosses bloom and produce flowers and fruit, he 
picks out the kinds that are commercially valuable and destroys 
the ninety and nine worthless children, often in a huge bonfire. 
His is a hit or miss method. Sometimes he uses pollen from four 
or five kinds of plants and shrewdly guesses at the one that be- 
came the father of his new plant creation, by its looks. Some- 
times his guess is correct, sometimes it is far from the truth. 
Because of this element of uncertainty in the methods of the 
practical breeder of plants, we are to-day very much in the dark 
as to the ancestry of most of our cultivated variety of vegetables, 
flowers and fruits. Whether the Concord grape is a cross be- 
tween a wild grape of this section of the country and a variety 
of old world grape— the raisin grape, or a seedling variation of 
the wild grape, is a disputed point, about which we can only 
guess. The same thing is true regarding the paternal ancestry 
