74 
THE NATIONAL NURSERYMAN. 
IN THE KAW VALLEY. 
N. Topeka, Kans., June 25 .—A. L. Brooke : “ Your 
request for a report on flood conditions reached me promptly, 
and found me wondering where I was at. 
“ I had thought of writing The Nurseryman before receiv¬ 
ing your letter, and in that way answer many questions asked 
of me privately. 
“ Personally I was greatly disappointed in not being able to 
meet my many friends at Detroit. The valley of the Kaw had 
almost a national reputation for its fertility and productive¬ 
ness. It now has added reputation, not so enviable it is true, 
but perhaps greater. 
“ On the evening of May 28 th, I pulled for high land with 
my family and live stock. I went none too soon. Those who 
remained until morning would have given gold for the rescue 
which money could not purchase. 
“ Then the battle for life was on, and for two or more days 
strong arms and gallant hearts fought the waves of great lakes 
of water and fierce currents of mighty rivers, and brought to 
land hundreds of people out of the mad waters. 
“ There are times that try men’s souls. We have had one of 
them. Those were awful days and nights. 
“ St. Joseph, Mo., Horton, Holton and other smaller cities, 
far away, were our near neighbors in help, with Topeka just 
across the channel as remote as Chicago. 
“ Think of a brisk little city of 6,000 or 7,000 people buried 
in the waters in one short night. Its streets had in this time 
become rivers ; not placid streams where boats could glide 
gently, but fierce, mad currents filled with the debris of cities, 
floating houses, drowned animals, tangled in places with a net¬ 
work of wires through which no boat could go and live. 
Well-to-do men retired that night to find themselves bankrupt 
on the morning of the 29 th of May. 
“ The town was not alone. Between Indian creek and 
Soldier creek, outside the city limits, 76 families left their 
homes. Some of these lost even their farms. 
“ When convention time came, I found myself one of the 
principal agents for free lunch stands, scattered among God’s 
best people on the uplands north of town. To have gone 
anywhere else at that time would have been moral cowardice. 
“ For several days I did not hear anything from J. H. Skin¬ 
ner of Peters & Skinner, but when I did I had a confirmation 
of what I already knew he would do. Everything he could 
do was done for a suffering people just as he does everything 
else—in the most earnest and thorough way possible. 
“ What, you ask, is the condition of the nurserymen of To¬ 
peka ? We have been so busy we have no inventory of losses. 
Mr. Skinner I think will have something accurate very soon. 
Personally, I am out of the market with everything. My 
spring plant of grafts escaped with the exception of a few 
acres. I hope to have the bad scars all healed within a year 
or such a matter. Out of a plant here of 550 bushels of apple 
seed the product of only about 100 is all that is left. The 
most fortunate one was F. W. Watson & Co., with a plant of 
some forty acres or more of fine apple seedling. 
“ I have no means at present of knowing just what is left of 
other stock. I can say, though, that so far as Topeka is con¬ 
cerned the glut of the market will not come from this source. 
11 We have all been well shaken up, but are not sore after 
the shaking. The people are all too busy to get despondent, 
and their pluck and faith prove them a brave people. A few 
years and all their sorrows will be forgotten and their fortunes 
will be repaired.” 
INTRODUCING NOVELTIES. 
Has an Element of Humor, Says Prof. Bailey—Nine Tenths of the 
Novelties Do Not Represent Progress—The Whole Ques¬ 
tion of Varieties—Many Good Old Ones. 
The subject of Prof. L. H. Bailey’s address before the 
American Association of Nurserymen at Detroit was “ The 
Whole Question of Varieties.” He admitted that the subject 
covered a very extensive field of discussion and reassured his 
hearers when he stated that he did not in his address expect to 
solve the whole question of varieties, but only to state some 
important and troublesome aspects of it. 
The Variety-Conception. 
He showed that the variety-conception is really a late idea 
in the development of the human race. He said : 
It is practically only within the past two centuries that cultivated 
varieties of plants have been recognized as being worthy of receiving 
designative names. It is within this period, also, that most of the 
great breeds of animals have been defined and separately named. All 
this measures the increasing intimacy of our contact with domesticated 
plants and animals. It is a record of our progress. The people 
that are most advanced in the cultivation of any plant are the ones 
that have the greatest number of named varieties of that plant. In 
Japan, to this day, the plums often pass under ill-defined class-names. 
We have introduced these classes iuto this country, have sorted out the 
particular forms that promise to be of value to us, and have given them 
specific American names. Not long ago a native professor of Japan 
wrote me asking for cions of these plums, in order that he might in¬ 
troduce Japanese plums into Japan. The Russian apples are desig¬ 
nated to some extent by class names. What constitutes a variety is 
increasingly more difficult to define, because we are constantly differ¬ 
entiating on smaller points. The growth of the variety conception is 
the growth of the power of analysis. 
The New Plant Breeding. 
Continuing Professor Bailey said : 
We are at the beginning of a new era in plant breeding. We are 
not only doing more actual work in breeding than we have done be¬ 
fore, but the purposes that we have in mind in attacking the problems 
are different from the old. It is of no consequence either to produce 
or to introduce a “new variety”; but it is of immense consequence to 
produce a line of plants having superior efficiency for some special 
purpose. Plant-breeding is worthy of the name only as it sets definite 
ideals and then works towards them with predictable assurance. Mere¬ 
ly sowing seeds to see what will turn up is not very different, so far as 
the probabilities of results is concerned, from the throwing of dice. 
We are to breed not so much for merely new and striking characters, 
that will enable us to name, describe and sell a “novelty,” as to improve 
the performance along accustomed lines. It may be worth while to 
produce a “new variety” of potato by raising new plants from the 
seed-bolls ; but it is much more to the point to augment the mealiness 
of some existing variety or to intensify its blight-resisting qualities. 
It may be worth while to have another large red apple, but it would be 
much more worth the while to have one of better quality for export. 
It is possible to secure a five or ten per cent increase in the efficiency of 
our field crops; this would mean the annual addition of hundreds of 
millions of dollars to be national gain. It is possible, also, to increase 
the efficiency of every kind of fruit and flower. 
In all the short-generation plants, that are grown from seeds and 
without the interposition of budding or grafting, it is relatively easy 
to augment the efficiency-points. This augmenting is accomplished by 
selection from individual plants of merit, quite Independently of the 
particular variety to which these plants belong. When the final result 
is attained, the race may not differ from its ancestors in outward de- 
scribable characters, but it may be more efficient in quality, in yield, in 
chemical content, in disease-resisting or drought-resisting qualities. 
Has it ever occurred to you that the practice of “introducing” novel- 
