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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE III. HOW DOMESTIC VARIETIES ORIGINATE . THE key is man's power of accumulative selection: nature gives successive variations; man adds them up in certain directions useful to him. This, in Darwin's phrase, is the essence of the cultivator's skill in ameliorating the vegetable kingdom. So far as man is concerned, the origin of the initial variation is largely chance, but this start or variation once given, he has the power, in most cases, to perpetuate it and to modify its characters. There are, then, two very different factors or problems in the origination of garden varieties, ? the production of the first departure or variation, and the subsequent breeding of it. Persons who give little thought to the subject, look upon variation as the end of their endeavors, thinking that a form comes into being with all its characters well marked and fixed. In reality, however, variation is but the beginning; selection is the end. I. Indeterminate Varieties. There are two general classes of garden varieties as respects the method of their origin, ?those which come into existence somewhat suddenly and which require little else of the husbandman than the multiplication of them, and those which are the result of a slow evolution or direct breeding. The former are indeterminate or uncertain, and the latter are determinate or definite. The greater part of those in the first class are plants which are multiplied or divided by bud-propagation. They comprise nearly all our fruits, the woody ornamental plants, and such herbaceous genera as begonia, canna, gladiolus, lily, dahlia, carnation, chrysanthemum, and the like, ? in fact, all those multiplied by grafting, cuttings, bulbs, or other asexual parts. The original plant may be either a seedling or a bud- sport. The gardener, wh...
| ISBN-13 | 9780217532044 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0217532047 |
| Weight | 0.70 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 0.48 In |
| List Price | $19.99 |
| Format | Paperback |
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| Pages | 212 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
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