1912. 
THE RURAL* NEW-YORKER 
4SO 
Ruralisms 
DO VINE PLANTS “MIX?” 
B. F. D., Michigan .—On page 300 a 
reader asks if watermelon and citron will 
mix. In the reply I note the statement is 
made that watermelon will not mix with 
pumpkin, squash, etc. Let me tell you my 
experience a number of years ago. We 
planted the seed of watermelon, locally 
known as “Little Sweet,” the seed was 
brown and only about two-thirds the size 
of common melon seed. The vines were fine 
leaved and did not make as large a growth 
as most varieties. One vine produced a 
fruit that was three or four times as large 
as usual, was ribbed like a pumpkin and 
when I cut it open I found the meat thick 
and white, and had it not been for a very 
little of the flesh in the center being red 
and sweet everyone would have said it 
was a green pumpkin. The seeds were like 
pumpkin seed, but were not fully developed 
and failed to grow when planted. There 
could be no mistake but what this was a 
watermelon-pumpkin cross. The vine was 
true to the melon type, but the fruit ran 
to pumpkin. 
Ans. —The watermelon is so distinct 
in many ways from other cucurbitaceous 
plants commonly cultivated that it would 
require more than an abnormal fruit, 
somewhat resembling a pumpkin, borne 
by the former, to convince growers that 
hybridization had been effected between 
the two species. Like other plants of 
its class the watermelon bears its pis¬ 
tillate and pollen-producing blooms sep- 
erately, and fertilization can only be 
effected by insect agency or other out¬ 
side forces. Pollen must be carried to 
the receptive stigma, if a fruit is to re¬ 
sult, from another bloom or plant, and 
it follows that watermelon blooms un¬ 
der garden conditions must often re¬ 
ceive pollen from pumpkins, muskmel- 
ons, gourds, cucumbers and squashes, 
and vice versa, but no true hybrids, par¬ 
taking of the characters of both par¬ 
ents, have been known to result. Care¬ 
ful pollinations between all the above 
species under conditions that excluded 
all sources of error have been made 
with absolutely negative results except 
in the case of the pumpkin-like gourds 
and squashes, which have been known 
to intercross with disastrous results to 
the quality of the product. 
The watermelon, like most long cul¬ 
tivated plants, is subject to sports or 
mutations—sudden changes of form or 
type, more or less permanent in char¬ 
acter—the result of causes as yet little 
understood. If these changes are of a 
character agreeable to the cultivator 
the new variety is perpetuated by selec¬ 
tion, if not it is allowed to perish. The 
monstrous pumpkin-like melon de¬ 
scribed by B. F. D. was probably of 
this character, but failed to perpetuate 
itself by not producing sound seeds. 
Growers need have little hesitation in 
planting watermelons near other cucur¬ 
bits, for while intercrossing may not 
be impossible it is at least excessively 
rare. The watermelon crosses readily 
enough with the preserving or vine 
citron, which is only a variety within 
the type species, Citrullus vulgaris, and 
often produces hard-fleshed mongrel 
fruits much like the one described by 
B. F. D. It is also suspected of hy¬ 
bridizing, when opportunity presents, 
with the atrociously bitter drug plant, 
Colocynth (Citrullus colocynthus), na¬ 
tive of the warmer parts of tropical 
Africa. Colocynth is really a close rela¬ 
tive of the cultivated watermelon, the 
vines being scarcely distinguishable 
apart, but the former, instead of having 
soft sweet flesh, bears a small hard- 
shelled melon with intensely bitter, 
fibrous interior, poisonous in large 
doses, but much used in medicine as a 
cathartic. _ v. 
An Orchard Burner. —Several years ago 
some one mentioned in The R. N.-Y. a 
method of burning brush or prunings from 
fruit trees as soon as the trees were pruned. 
We have used for two seasons a brush 
burner in all of our orchards, and it has 
given good results. The burner was origin¬ 
ally a lining to a cupola in a foundry. It is 
made up of seven-foot long plates, % inch 
thick, three feet wide, each piece weighing 
between 175 and 200 pounds. There were 
six pieces which were secured for. the 
price of old iron, making its cost about 
$7. Last Fall when cleaning up a new 
farm the brush from over a mile of haw¬ 
thorn hedge was burnt as soon as it was 
cut off close to the ground. The burner 
has been in use all Winter, sliding easily 
over two feet of snow, where the snow was 
too deep to use horses with shoes safely. 
At present only four pieces comprise the 
burner. j. s. allis. 
Orleans Co., N. Y. 
A DISCUSSION OF MENDELISM. 
A. H. O., Lawrence, Kan .—In a recent 
lecture by a professor on “Recent Develop¬ 
ments in Plant Breeding,” he referred to a 
book used as he said in many colleges, 
which he called Mendel’s laws of plant 
breeding. The ideas were so at variance 
with my preconceived notions of things that 
I differed in many if not most ideas put 
forth. He claimed the book taught that the 
crossing of varieties of plants made hybrids, 
and to continue breeding from them in 
time reproduced the original form. Is that 
hybridizing or cross-breeding? What do 
you know of this priest Mendel? Is he 
recognized as authority? 
Ans. —Mendel’s principles of heredity 
(we cannot truly call them laws, and 
that modest worker in science would 
certainly have been unwilling to use 
such a term) are too complicated to be 
boiled down into one short answer, but 
the subject imperatively demands the 
attention of every hybridizer. Gregor 
Mendel was born in 1822 of Austro- 
Silesian parents, entered a religious or¬ 
der at the age of 21, and was ordained 
a priest, afterwards becoming Abbot 
of Brunn. Studying the natural sci¬ 
ences in Vienna (1851-1853) he be¬ 
came interested in plant hybridization, 
carrying on extensive experiments with 
peas and other plants. It is his work 
with peas that brought out the princi¬ 
ples we associate with his name. He 
was a very busy man, and wrote but 
little, nor was any special recognition 
given to his work during his lifetime. 
Darwin was then occupying full atten¬ 
tion, and the Abbot of Brunn remained 
unknown. He died in 1884, thirty-five 
years after his modest paper on plant 
hybridization was contributed to the 
Natural History Society of Brunn; it 
was found to contain a clue to ques¬ 
tions puzzling the hybridizers, which 
had not been answered by Darwin’s 
views on natural selection in the pro¬ 
duction of new species. In 1900 Men¬ 
del’s principles were re-discovered, 40 
years after he had given their outlines 
to science. The book referred to is no 
doubt “Mendelism,” by R. C. Punnett, 
now in its third edition, price $1.25. 
You will find there a discussion of 
“dominant” and “recessive” characters, 
which explains the hybrids breeding 
back to the original form to which you 
refer. When two pure strains are bred 
together the resulting hybrids resemble 
the dominant patent. Bred among them¬ 
selves, the offspring bear one-quarter 
the recessive, and three-quarters the 
dominant character. The latter is di¬ 
vided among pure and impure domi¬ 
nants. Both the “extracted” pure domi¬ 
nants and the “extracted” recessives, 
which are formed in any generation 
after a cross, breed true to the types of 
the original parents used in that cross. 
You must read Punnett’s book to be¬ 
come familiar with the gametes, zygotes, 
heterozygotes and homozygotes which 
will give you an understanding of these 
mysterious dominants and recessives. 
As an example in human life, we have 
known two normally black-haired fam¬ 
ilies where one or more children with 
fiery red hair showed among the sable 
locks of the others; black hair was a 
dominant family trait, but red hair was 
a recessive character. The Blue An- 
dalusiap fowl, according to science, is 
still a mongrel; the pure birds in this 
breed are the black and white “wasters,” 
which, when mated together, give twice 
the proportion of pure blue fowls that 
are produced by mating blue with blue. 
The dominants and recessives will 
throw some light on the variations of 
plumage in fowls we consider purebred. 
The Mesquite. —Descriptions of scen¬ 
ery in the Southwest often contain ref¬ 
erence to the mesquite, which, while 
only a bush in arid regions, becomes a 
real tree under favorable conditions. It 
is a pod-bearing tree with a habit of 
growth quite like the apple—a heavy 
wide-spreading top on a short, stout 
trunk. It is very thorny, but both leaves 
and pods are eaten by horses and cattle 
when grass is scarce, and the seeds are 
greedily eaten by birds and small ani¬ 
mals. Its wood is hard and durable, 
and valuable for fuel as well as small 
building and repairs. In upper Cali¬ 
fornia the mesquite is often seriously 
injured by the parasitic native mistle¬ 
toe. Dr. MacDougal of the Desert Lab¬ 
oratory describes one wide-spreading 
mesquite whose top was so overloaded 
with mistletoe that it looked as though 
a small load of clover hay had been 
pitched into it. 
The Repp orchard at Glassboro, N. J., 
contains 50,000 to 60,000 trees. He us¬ 
ually sets out 7,000 or 8,000 trees a year. 
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