. Genetics in relation to agriculture. Livestock; Heredity; Variation (Biology); Plant breeding. 396 GENETICS IN RELATION TO AGRICULrURE Stuart in 1911 conducted a tuber-unit experiment with some 150 standard commercial varieties of potatoes. 'Tlie seed used was grown in Burlington, Vt., in 1910, on land which had not grown a cultivated crop of anj' kind for at least 35 years. In addition to this the seed was selected from the most promising hills at the time the crop was harvested. The tubers as a whole were remarkably uniform in size and there could, therefore, have been little difference in
. Genetics in relation to agriculture. Livestock; Heredity; Variation (Biology); Plant breeding. 396 GENETICS IN RELATION TO AGRICULrURE Stuart in 1911 conducted a tuber-unit experiment with some 150 standard commercial varieties of potatoes. 'Tlie seed used was grown in Burlington, Vt., in 1910, on land which had not grown a cultivated crop of anj' kind for at least 35 years. In addition to this the seed was selected from the most promising hills at the time the crop was harvested. The tubers as a whole were remarkably uniform in size and there could, therefore, have been little difference in the size of the seed pieces used. Any variation, therefore, which occurred between the. Fig. âStrong and weak tuber-units of the Gold Coin varietj' of potatoes. Nos. 1 â iiid 2 represent strong and weak tuber-units in 1911; Nos. .3 and 4 represent j-ields from tuber-units 1 and 2; Nos. .5 and 6 represent yields in 1912 from 5 tuber-units of Nos. 3 and 4. (After Stuart.) plants of the various tuljcrs which were planted would seem to be due to some inherent tendency in the tuber itself. The remarkable dissimilarity between the growing plants of the individual units of a variety planted contiguously in the row was so siu-prising that some three dozen units were photographed and when these were harvested the tubers were also photographed (see Fig. 163). It was found that the divergency in A-iekl was just as great as in the size and vigor of the plants. In 1912 five units were planted from both strong and weak plants, and it was found in practically every instance that the low-yiolding 1911 plants gave poor germination, a feeble vine growth and a still lower yield than in ; There have been many experiments similar to the one above de- scribed and they certainly indicate that a certain proportion (from 5 to Digitized by Microsoft®. Please note that these images are extracted from scanned page images that may have been digitally enhanced for readability - colorati
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