File:Luther Burbank- his methods and discoveries and their practical application. Prepared from his original field notes covering more than 100,000 experiments made during forty years devoted to plant (14782702974).jpg

Identifier: lutherburbankhis04burbuoft (find matches)
Title: Luther Burbank: his methods and discoveries and their practical application. Prepared from his original field notes covering more than 100,000 experiments made during forty years devoted to plant improvement, with the assistance of the Luther Burbank Society and its entire membership, under the editorial direction of John Whitson and Robert John and Henry Smith Williams
Year: 1914 (1910s)
Authors: Burbank, Luther, 1849-1926 John, Robert Whitson, John Williams, Henry Smith, 1863-1943 Luther Burbank Society
Subjects: Plant-breeding
Publisher: New York Luther Burbank Press
Contributing Library: Gerstein - University of Toronto
Digitizing Sponsor: University of Toronto

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n the eastern United States, and for that matter most of the finest Californian varieties, are the bearers of an impulse to development that was given by a French horticulturist, Jean Baptiste Van Mons, and Andrew Knight of England about a century ago. Van Mons acted on a theory, now abandoned, that young plants produce the best progeny. But this led him to sow, to re-sow, to sow again, to sow perpetually. And he selected his seeds with such care as to develop many improved varieties. In particular, he taught some pears to bear fruit in three years from the seed. Van Mons produced by selection about four hundred new varieties of pears, among others a dwarf variety that was a prolific bearer. Meantime, however, the pear was making its way in America, and one of the most famous varieties, the Seckel, originated in the early part of the nineteenth century on the farm of a man whose name it bears near Philadelphia. This was a spontaneous variant or mutant, the precise origin of which is unknown.
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Image Caption:
Introducing Color
Here are pear seedlings that not only show wide diversity of form, but almost equally wide variation in color. It has previously been pointed out that the pear usually lacks color. Here, obviously, particularly in the specimen shown in the center, is the opportunity for development of pears having richly colored skins like those of the apple. Mr. Burbank's experiments in this direction have already had interesting results.
Text Appearing After Image:
LUTHER BURBANK
At the time of its origin the Seckel was pronounced by the conservative London Horticulturist Society to be superior to any European variety of fall pear then known. Rather curiously it chanced that the next very notable step in the progress of the pear also took place on a farm near Philadelphia. The owner of the farm was Mr. Peter Kieffer. The thing for which he was responsible was the introduction of a pear bearing his name, which originated through the chance hybridization of a pear of European strain with the Chinese sand pear, which had been introduced as an ornamental garden tree not long after relations were established between America and the Far East. The oriental pear which thus at last came to mingle its racial strains with those of this remote relative, after the two had traveled around the world in opposite directions, was a graceful tree having large and attractive flowers and bearingfruit of a j>leasing fragrance but of such consist-ency as to be almost uneatable

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