It so happened that I was a boy working for my father when he produced the first com- 
mercial hybrid corn seed crop grown in Indiana about 1927. Professors R. R. St. John and 
John F. Trost, of Purdue University, taught my brother, Eugene, and myself the technique 
of inbreeding and completing the crosses to make inbred hybrids. 
Mr. St. John is now head plant breeder for the DeKalb Agricultural Association, which 
produces in the neighborhood of $30,000,000 worth of hybrid seed corn yearly as well as 
millions of doliars worth of hybrid chickens. Mr. Trost is head plant breeder for the Farm- 
caft company, another large producer of hybrid seed corn. 
In succeeding years, college professors and other plant breeders have branched into 
many other fields with inbreeding, always with the same astonishing results. Henry Wal- 
lace, who was one of the earliest developers of hybrid corn, left office as vice president of 
the United States to develop hybrid chickens, which are now revolutionizing the poultry 
industry. Agricultural colleges have developed many inbred strains of swine, which are 
doing the same for the hog industry. 
Many others have worked on various types of vegetables and flowers, with W. Atlee 
Burpee & Co. pioneering the work on their famous Fordhook breeding farms. As a result, 
we now have inbred hybrid tomatoes, sweet corn, eggplant, cucumbers, zinnias and sweet- 
peas that have no competitors among the older varieties. 
I conceived the idea in 1942 that inbred hybrids could be produced in gladiolus and all 
other vegetatively propagated plants as well. That year, I started inbreeding, with Pfit- 
zer's Blue Beauty. Good blues, then and still, were scarce. I knew that the Pfitzer family 
in Germany had linebred scientifically for half a century. Thus, I presumed Blue Beauty 
had a purer and healthier background than most of the blues. Blooming of the resulting 
inbreds brought out the interesting fact that apparently 90 per cent of the blood of Blue 
Beauty is purple. However, I did get a few blue inbreds with health in both bulbs and 
foliage. 
Inbreeding, I should explain, is done by placing pollen of a flower on the stigma of the 
same flower, thus crossing it with itself. A detailed explanation of the results would be 
too long for the space available. Generally speaking, however, it results in sorting out the 
characteristics of all the ancestors of the particular flower, in accordance with Mendel’s 
laws of segregation and resegregation. This sorting permits the discarding of inbreds which 
exhibit the weaknesses of the ancestors and intensifying the good qualities in other inbreds 
so their hereditary value is far superior to the original flower. 
Crossing of two of the Blue Beauty inbreds (BB1 x BB7) resulted in the inbred. hybrid 
(Fl cross) Blue Blood, which has a mammoth slate blue bloom and the healthiest, largest, 
most vigorous foliage of any glad I have ever seen. This, I am introducing this year. 
While the magic of inbreeding is shown best by crossing two inbreds to gain the vigor 
which results from combining them, several of my inbreds have shown themselves to be 
superior to the parents themselves and I’m anxiously awaiting results when bloom is pro- 
duced from crossing them. Driven Snow (I) is an example. An inbred of the old familiar 
Queen of Bremen, which I selected because of its healthiness and fast propagation as well 
as the beautiful color, the inbred came a pure white, with beautiful ruffling. In addition to 
the other fine traits, it makes the tallest plant with the longest flowerhead I have ever seen 
in the 200 size, which was far from true of the parent. 
The inbreds offered for sale here may be crossed with each other or with other inbreds 
or with a standard variety to produce what is known in geneticist’s language as a top 
cross. In any of these procedures, you will be assured of far more uniform and superior 
results than with any cross using standard varieties. | 
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