American Pomology. Apples. John Aston Warder

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СКАЧАТЬ into fruit than the first, and showed a greater promise. Successive generations were thus produced to the fourth and fifth, each came into bearing earlier than its predecessor, and produced a greater number of good varieties, and he says that in the fifth generation they were nearly all of great excellence. He found pears required the longest time, five generations; while the apple was perfected in four, and stone fruits in three.

      Starting upon the theory that we must subdue the vigor of the wilding to produce the best fruits, he cut off the tap roots when transplanting and shortened the leaders, and crowded the plants in the orchard or fruiting grounds, so as to stand but a few feet apart. He urged the "regenerating in a direct line of descent as rapidly as possible an improving variety, taking care that there be no interval between the generations. To sow, re-sow, to sow again, to sow perpetually, in short to do nothing but sow, is the practice to be pursued, and which cannot be departed from; and, in short, this is the whole secret of the art I have employed." (Arbres Fruitiers.)

      Who else would have the needed patience and perseverance to pursue such a course? Very few, indeed—especially if they were not very fully convinced of the correctness of the premises upon which this theory is founded. Mr. Downing thinks that the great numbers of fine varieties of apples that have been produced in this country, go to sustain the Van Mons doctrine, because, as he assumes, the first apples that were produced from seeds brought over by the early emigrants, yielded inferior fruit which had run back toward the wild state, and the people were forced to begin again with them, and that they most naturally pursued this very plan, taking seeds from the improving varieties for the next generations and so on. This may have been so, but it is mere assumption—we have no proof, and, on the contrary, our choice varieties have so generally been conceded to have been chance seedlings, that there appears little evidence to support it—on the contrary, some very fine varieties have been produced by selecting the seeds of good sorts promiscuously, and without regarding the age of the trees from which the fruit was taken. Mr. Downing himself, after telling us that we have much encouragement to experiment upon this plan of perfecting fruits, by taking seeds from such as are not quite ripe, gathered from a seedling of promising quality, from a healthy young tree (quite young,) on its own root, not grafted, and that we "must avoid 1st, the seeds of old trees; 2d, those of grafted trees; 3d, that we must have the best grounds for good results"—still admits what we all know, that "in this country, new varieties of rare excellence are sometimes obtained at once by planting the seeds of old grafted varieties; thus the Lawrence Favorite and the Columbia Plums were raised from seeds of the Green Gage, one of the oldest European varieties."

      Let us now look at an absolute experiment conducted avowedly upon the Van Mons plan in our own country, upon the fertile soil of the State of Illinois, and see to what results it led:—

      The following facts have been elicited from correspondence with H.P. Brayshaw, of Du Quoin, Illinois. The experiments were instituted by his father many years ago, to test the truth of the Van Mons' theory of the improvement of fruits by using only the first seeds.

      Thirty-five years ago, in 1827, his father procured twenty-five seedling trees from a nursery, which may be supposed to have been an average lot, grown from promiscuous seed. These were planted, and when they came into bearing, six of them furnished fruit that might be called "good" and of these, "four were considered fine." One of the six is still in cultivation, and known as the Illinois Greening. Of the remainder of the trees, some of the fruits were fair, and the rest were worthless, and have disappeared.

      Second Generation.—The first fruits of these trees were selected, and the seeds were sown. Of the resulting crop, some furnished fruit that was "good," but they do not appear to have merited much attention.

      Third Generation.—From first seeds of the above, one hundred trees were produced, some of which were good fruit, and some "even fine," while some were very poor, "four or five only merited attention." So that we see a retrogression from the random seedlings, furnishing twenty-five per cent, of good fruit, to only four or five per cent. in the third generation, that were worthy of note.

      Fourth Generation.—A crop of the first seed was again sown, producing a fourth generation; of these many were "good culinary fruits," none, or very few being of the "poorest class of seedlings," none of them, however, were fine enough "for the dessert."

      Fifth Generation.—This crop of seedlings was destroyed by the cut-worms, so that only one tree now remains, but has not yet fruited. But Mr. Brayshaw appears to feel hopeful of the results, and promises to continue the experiment.

      Crops have also been sown from some of these trees, but a smaller proportion of the seedlings thus produced were good fruits, than when the first seeds were used—this Mr. Brayshaw considers confirmatory evidence of the theory, though he appears to feel confidence in the varieties already in use, most of which had almost an accidental origin.

      He thinks the result would have been more successful had the blossoms been protected from impregnation by other trees, and recommends that those to be experimented with should be planted at a distance from orchards, so as to avoid this cross-breeding, and to allow of what is called breeding in-and-in. If this were done, he feels confident that "the seedlings would more nearly resemble the parent, and to a certain extent would manifest the tendency to improvement, and that from the earliest ripened fruits, some earlier varieties would be produced, from those latest ripening, later varieties, from those that were inferior and insipid, poor sorts would spring, and that from the very best and most perfect fruits we might expect one in one thousand, or one-tenth of one per cent., to be better than the parent." This diminishes the chance for improvement to a beautifully fine point upon which to hang our hopes of the result of many generations of seedlings occupying more than a lifetime of experiments.

      Mr. Brayshaw, citing some of the generally adopted axioms of breeders of animals, assumes that crosses, as of distinct races, will not be so likely to produce good results, as a system of breeding in-and-in, persistently carried out. This plan he recommends, and alludes to the quince and mulberry as suitable species to operate upon, because in them there are fewer varieties, and therefore less liability to cross-breeding, and a better opportunity for breeding in-and-in. He also reminds us of the happy results which follow the careful selection of the best specimens in garden flowers and vegetables, combined with the rejection of all inferior plants, when we desire to improve the character of our garden products, and he adopts the views of certain physiologists, which, however, are questioned by other authorities, to the effect that violent or decided crosses are always followed by depreciation and deterioration of the offspring.

      The whole communication referring to these experiments, which are almost the only ones, so far as I know, which have been conducted in this country to any extent, to verify or controvert the Van Mons' theory, is very interesting, but it is easy to perceive that the experimenter, though apparently very fair, and entirely honest, has been fully imbued with the truth and correctness of the proposition of Van Mons, that the first ripened seed of a natural plant was more likely to produce an improved variety, and that this tendency to improvement would ever increase, and be most prominent in the first ripened seeds of successive generations grown from it.

      The theory of Van Mons I shall not attempt in this place to controvert, but will simply say that nothing which has yet come under my observation has had a tendency to make me a convert to the avowed views of that great Belgian Pomologist, while, on the contrary, the rumors of his opponents, that he was really attempting to produce crosses from some of the best fruits, as our gardeners have most successfully done in numerous instances, in the beautiful flowers and delicious vegetables of modern horticulture, have always impressed me with a color of probability, and if he were not actually and intentionally impregnating the blossoms with pollen of the better varieties, natural causes, such as the moving currents of air, and the ever active insects, whose special function in many instances appears to be the conveyance of pollen, would necessarily cause an admixture, which, in a promiscuous and crowded collection, like the "school of Van Mons," would at least have an equal chance of producing СКАЧАТЬ