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Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 139, 30 October 1912, Page 4

AGRICULTURAL SCIENCE.

A writer in Dalgety's Review says it is becoming more and more evident to the practical agriculturalist —as it has been for generations back to the pastoralist—that the breed of the growing commodity with which he has to deal has largely to do with success or failure in his operations. The agricultural lab oratories of Cambridge and of Rothamsted, in England, as well as those of the United States and Canada and other places, are busy with investigations on the subject, more especially as regards wheat and maximum production through breeding. The ordinary farmer discerns no differences in the ears of his grain It is corn, and only corn. And yet, however homogenous a field of com may appear, it is in reality a mixture which varies year by year in the proportion* of its different races. This is true of practically all of our cultivated plants. It is equally 'true of some wild species, and perhaps of all. If the flower of any particular form of plant be carefully protected from chance pollination by the pollination of some other form, and its seed isolated and grown separately, it will yield plants practically identical with the parent form. That also is the case with the. cereals which supply man with food. In connection with wheat, it waß first noted about one hundred years ago by a Spanish professor of botany, Mariano Lagasca. He was then on a visit to a friend, Colonel Le Couteur, who had a number of farms in Jersey, some of which were used to grow wheat. Lagasca pointed out to his host that the fields of wheat were not really pure and uniform, as was then the prevailing belief, and he distinguished no fewer than twenty-three varieties all growing together. ITe suggested that some of the varieties might form a larger part of the harvest than othors, and that some were possibly of more economical value than the rest. Le Couteur took the hint and saved the seeds of a single plant of each supposed variety separately. He thus laid the foundations of the method by which different varieties of wheats have been obtained and maintained. As with wheat, »o with other plants. If they are carefully isolated and their self-pollination is assured, they will breed true to their own variety forms. All the. supposed cases of the instability of these forms have been due to pollination of mixed wheats by the pollen from other and adjacent forms. Fifty-five years later, Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk, publiohed the results of his investigations on the inheritance of unit-characters in peas. Up to his time and later it was tacitly accepted as an uncriticised belief that species were aggregates of inseparable characters—that is, the whole group of characters which constituted a species were, indissolubly bound together and could not be broken up. Each species kad to be regarded, if we may take an analogy, as a bundle of sticks, each having a different color, size, thickness, hardness and so on. And the bundle could not be disintegrated. It was not clearly convinced that one or more of these sticks (scientific characters) could be separated out from the bundle and made to replace some alternative, stick (corresponding specific character) in another bundle (another species). The importance of this discovery was of the great-

est. It enabled man to do consciously and certainly what before he only achieved by haphazard and accidental efforts, For he could now take the desirable qualities of another variety and form a new race full of the very qualities which the miller and baker require.