Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 79.djvu/325

Rh proper sense degenerative returns to a wild type, for in several examples the rogues have pointed pods like the cultivated sorts from which they have presumably been derived. All the more primitive kinds have the dominant stump-ended pod. If the rogues had the stump pods they would fall in the class of dominants, but they have no single quality which can be declared to be certainly dominant to the type, and I see no reason why they may not be actually recessives to it after all. Whether this is the true account or not we shall know for certain next year. Mr. Sutton has given me a quantity of material which we are now investigating at the John Innes Horticultural Institution, and by sowing the seed of a great number of individual plants separately I anticipate that we shall prove the rogue-throwers to be a class apart. The pure types then separately saved should, according to expectation, remain rogue-free, unless further sporting or fresh contamination occurs. If it prove that the long and attenuated rogues are really recessive to the shorter and more robust type, the case will be one of much physiological significance, but I believe a parallel already exists in the case of wheats, for among certain crosses bred by Professor Biffen, some curious spelt-like plants occurred among the derivatives from such robust wheats as Rivet and Red Fife.

There is another large and important class of cases to which similar considerations apply. I refer to the bolting or running to seed of crops grown as biennials, especially root crops. It has hitherto been universally supposed that the loss due to this cause, amounting in sugar beet as it frequently does to five, or even more, per cent., is not preventable. This may prove to be the truth, but I think it is not impossible that the bolters can be wholly, or almost wholly, eliminated by the application of proper breeding methods. In this particular example I know that season and conditions of cultivation count for a good deal in promoting or checking the tendency to run to seed, nevertheless one can scarcely witness the sharp distinction between the annual and biennial forms without suspecting that genetic composition is largely responsible. If it proves to be so, we shall have another remarkable illustration of the direct applicability of knowledge gained from a purely academic source. "Let not him that putteth his armor on boast him as he that putteth it off," and I am quite alive to the many obstacles which may lie between the conception of an idea and its realization. One thing, however, is certain, that we have now the power to formulate rightly the question which the breeder is to put to nature; and this power and the whole apparatus by which he can obtain an answer to his question—in whatever sense that answer may be given—has been derived from experiments designed with the immediate object of investigating that scholastic and seemingly barren problem, "What is a species?" If Mendel's eight years' work had been done in