Part 5 (1/2)
In every case--and, as already said, I am not undervaluing the work done--the chemist has left us only on the threshold of the real problem. He has stood outside the factory in which the real work we want to know about is being carried on, and has told us of so many tons of this material being carried in at the gates, and of so many tons of that coming out; he has even burnt down the factory, and all its contents and machinery, and has then told us how many tons of the various materials were there at the time; but this is not what we want, valuable as the information is, and still more will be. What we want, and what we expect to obtain, is more information regarding what is done with the materials in the factory: what machinery they are put into, and how they are put in: what stages they go through, and how the stages follow one another: what wear and tear has to be endured, and how we can step in and stop the working of the machine for our own benefit at the best possible time.
The physiologist proceeds empirically, by experimenting with the living machinery. He recognises the parts and their structure, and tries to find out what they are doing: he knows that the laws of physics and chemistry cannot be traversed, but he sees these laws at work under special and very complex and peculiar conditions. He therefore, as the results of his experiments, sets new questions--or old questions under new conditions, if you like--and undoubtedly wants the help of both chemist and physicist; or, if it is preferred, the chemist and physicist may attack the problems, but they must familiarise themselves with the peculiar mechanism of the organism concerned, and cannot hope to attain success without experimenting with it. I confess it seems to me as reasonable to look upon scientific agriculture as a branch chiefly of chemistry as it would be to look upon horse-breeding or pigeon-rearing from the same point of view; and why the professed chemist's advice is regarded as so comforting and final in the one case and not in the other is one of those mysteries which seem inherent in human nature.
The central point in agriculture is the plant: get the most out of it--the energy-winning machine which alone can keep the animals and everything else connected with the farm going--and all the rest follows.
The old agriculture has taken a gloomy view of things, and especially on account of a large variable which it blames for many ills, namely, the season or climate. Perhaps the old agriculture has not sufficiently recognised that Nature grows plants in accordance with the fact that variation is not peculiar to the weather: if the seasons vary, so do fruit and other produce and the plants which yield them; and since man cannot hope to control the one variable, possibly relief will be found in doing more, within his limits, towards controlling others.
In any case he cannot hope to succeed without study of the physiology of the plant.
NOTES TO CHAPTER VII.
An admirable short account of soil in its relation to root-hairs is given in Sachs' _Lectures_, XV.; but for a more exhaustive treatment of the subject of soil the reader is referred to King, _The Soil_ (Wisconsin, 1895), or Warrington, _Lectures on the Physical Properties of Soil_ (Oxford, 1900); Larbaletrier, _L'Agriculture_ (Paris, 1888), chapters II. and III. There is also a very good account in Bailey, _The Principles of Agriculture_ (London, 1898), chapters I.-III.
With reference to the organisms in soils and the decompositions they bring about, the student should consult Kramer, _Die Bakteriologie in ihren Beziehungen zur Landwirthschaft_ (Wien, 1890), and Lafar, _Technical Mycology_ (Engl. edition, 1898), sections V., VIII., and IX.
CHAPTER VIII.
HYBRIDISATION AND SELECTION.
_The crossing of varieties of wheat, etc.--The essentials of fertilisation--Rimpau's experiments--Hybrids and selected varieties._
In the more hopeful view of the case which the new agriculture will have to take, it will recognise the physiological truth that since the living plant is the important and variable machine which constructs the produce looked for, and since that machine will work best in proportion as its needs are properly satisfied; therefore in cases where the needs of a given type of the machine cannot be efficiently provided for, it will be well to select some other type which will take what supplies and conditions can be offered. Of course, this is already recognised to a certain extent, as is implied in the practices of ”rotation of crops,”
selection of ”pedigree wheats” and mixtures of ”pasture gra.s.ses,” and in decisions as to the quality of land according to the kinds of weeds found on it, and so forth; but I am convinced that the agriculturist of the future--and the same applies to the horticulturist, planter and forester--will have to concern himself more systematically with the working and the variability of the plant, and particularly with what Darwin termed Variation under Domestication, than has always been the custom in the past. The subject of the plasticity of cultivated plants, and especially of hybrids, is in one sense an old one; but much work is being done which proves, as such work is apt to do, that very much more may be done by well-planned experiments on the selection of new varieties raised by hybridising and cultivation.
In ill.u.s.tration of this point, a short summary of some of the results of crossing different species of wheat, barley, oats, peas, beet, etc., may serve to show what has been gained and what may be hoped for in these directions. It should be stated that much has been done and is being done in this country as well as abroad, as witness English varieties of corn, peas, and potatoes, and the recent experiments on crossing various kinds of maize in America.
The hybridiser grows his cereals, etc., in pots until ready for crossing, and then takes them into the laboratory, removes the weaker spikelets, and takes out the young stamens from the flowers left on the plant. The female plant is then ready, and the flowers covered with paper caps. The pollen, obtained by a clean wet brush from the plant chosen as the father, is then carefully placed in position on the stigmas, and the caps replaced. The pollination is repeated occasionally, and care taken that no uncrossed flowers develop later. In this way a few seeds or grains are got to start with.
This would be the place to introduce an account of the enormous advances made by the botanists of the last decade or two in the study of the microscopic phenomena of fertilisation. Without going into details--which would more than occupy all the s.p.a.ce at command--I may recall the discoveries of Strasburger and his pupils, and of Guignard, which have supplemented the earlier discoveries of De Bary, Cohn, and Hofmeister, by establis.h.i.+ng the facts that the essential point in fertilisation is the fusion of two nuclei, and the bringing together in the fused ma.s.s of two extremely minute thread-like coiled bodies, the so-called chromatosomes or filaments, one of which is derived from the male and the other from the female parent. The particulars as to the marvellous adaptations to secure the union of these two infinitesimally minute threads, their behaviour immediately before and after union, and many other points must be pa.s.sed over, as I have only s.p.a.ce to emphasise the one crowning discovery that these tiny filaments of nuclear substance are the material carriers of all the hereditary properties of the parents to the young plant which their union initiates.
It must not be supposed that the above statements are based on any meagre foundation of facts. The attraction of the fusing nucleated ma.s.ses had been demonstrated over and over again by Tulasne, De Bary, Strasburger and others; but Pfeffer brought the matter to a crisis by discovering the attractive (chemotactic) substance emitted in given cases, and by collecting the fertilising bodies by its means into artificial tubes.
The fusion of the nucleated bodies in the s.e.xual act was observed by Strasburger in the living plant a few years ago, and numerous later observers have confirmed it. Meanwhile all the stages of approach and contact of the essential filaments of the nuclear substance have been traced, as also all the stages of the transference of half of each filament, male and female, into each of the first two cells of the very young embryo-plant.
Moreover, the essentials are found to be the same in the animal kingdom also, and the bearing of all these discoveries on the phenomena of reproduction, variation, and heredity in living organisms has been and is of the highest importance, for they support, control, explain and correct so many of the splendid results of Knight, Kolreuter, Sprengel, Hildebrand and Hermann Muller, and in every direction throw side-lights into the crevices of that magnificent structure, the theory of Natural Selection, erected for all time by our countryman, Charles Darwin.
To return now to experiments on crossing. It is found that the first products of the crossing appear exactly alike; they may have characters intermediate between those of the father and mother, or they may resemble one more than the other, but all the seeds of the same cross do it in the same way.
On then sowing the seeds of the plants produced from this first cross, variations begin to appear. Most of the progeny revert to one or other of the parent forms, others show all conceivable combinations of their characters, and a few may give rise to entirely new characters. In succeeding generations the reversions are preponderant, and, supposing no care is taken to prevent it, the whole of the offspring gradually go back to the ancestral type.
Some important consequences result, however, if systematic care is brought to bear on the matter. This tendency to variation in the second generation of crossed plants has often been noted, and it bears out very distinctly the conclusions to which Darwin came.
The hybridiser takes advantage of this variation, as others have done, to select some forms and rigidly suppress others, in order to obtain well-marked varieties of the plants he experiments with. In ill.u.s.tration, I may take the following from Rimpau's account of his experiments on crossing wheat: By crossing a white English long-eared, dense wheat, and celebrated as a heavy cropper, with a red, looser German wheat, remarkable for its resistance to winter cold, Rimpau hoped to obtain a variety uniting both the above qualities. As regards the property of resistance, he failed, and he eventually gave up the attempts in face of the advantages offered by the so-called _Square-heads_, which then came into the market. His experiments, even with the above varieties, are worth noting, however, for they show how promising the results of carefully conducted crossing and selection may be.
The crossing was done in 1875, in both directions. In 1876 the few grains obtained were found to yield plants almost all alike, with the long loose ear of the German parent, but the paler colour of the English wheat.
In 1877 the plants, obtained by sowing the finest grains, were found to consist of pure white, pure red, and of forms which appeared to vary and revert in all possible degrees as regards colour, density, and other characters intermediate between these.