Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 252, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 October 1912 — GROW LARGER GRAIN [ARTICLE]

GROW LARGER GRAIN

Professor De Vries Tells of His Recent Experiments. Eminent Scientist Plans to Increase the Size of the World’s Food Plants —New Species at Once. New York. —Prof. Hugo de Vries, director of the American botanical garden and the recognized dean of botanists, lectured at the New York botanical gardens on bis recent observa* tionß and experiments in the mutation of plants. Many scientists attended the lecture, and lauded Professor de Vries as “thd-'successor to Darwin and a great benefactor to the nations.” Doctor de Vries, a man of about sixty years, does not mind being called a successor to Darwin, whose work he has adopted. He would deny, however, that he has gone further than Darwin in his understanding of plant life. It was exactly the divergence between Darwin’s conclusions and his own conclusions that constituted the subject matter of Doctor de Vries’ lecture. Darwin, it Is recalled, explained the origin of new species by the theory of gradual variation. Doctor de Vries, on the other hand, while he admits that there are no end of gradual vJfi* ations In plant life, adds that new species also come into being by “leaps and bounds” in a single day, as it were. He explained his theory by the exhibition of slides illustrating his own observations. The best illustrations of the mutation of plants, Doctor de Vries noted in such flowers as the foxglove, daisy, evening primrose and marigold- 1° his own experiments, starting with an ordinary single daisy and keeping all the seed and planting it, he noticed second year daisies having twice as many petals as they had the first year and at the expense of a diminishing center. Continuing the selection of the seed from the exceptional specimens in each daisy patch he grew within four years a daisy which had no center seed pods whatever, and which had increased its petals or ray flowen during that time from twentyone to two hundred. Needless to say. the new flower did not resemble the ordinary daisy at all, and It remained intact as a distinct species of-flora. This illustration wax evidence, Professor de Vries maintained, of the necessity of Increasing the yields of all plants, so that the Increasing population of the future might not want His optimism in the development of plant life extends to wheat and rice and the other grains, although be eaid he was r-1 yet experimenting Ip those fields. “Doctor de Vries is not rivaling our jwa Burbank,” said Dr. W. A. director of the New York botanical gardens, after the lecture. “He stands supreme in his own line of endeavor. His experiments are purely theoretical. Burbank tries to develop the big* gear plums and the biggest potatoes, but de Vries tries to make two petals grow where but one grew before. He is paving the way far the bigger Burof the future. , a •• experimental stations, you

know, are practical, and they seek practical results in the culture of foodstuffs. But some day that line of experimental work will be exhausted, and scientists will ask for something new. Then some one will apply, In a practical way, the principles which Professor de Vries is now laying down. The secret of the future is to be able to repeat exactly by agriculture the mutations as observed now in nature. That is the work of science, and that Is where the new and bigger Burbanks will have their future."