PLANT BREEDING by A. L. HAGEDOORN, Ph. D. Preface: Twenty years ago
I wrote my Handbook of Animal and Plant Breeding in the Dutch
language, and my Animal Breeding, grew out of the first book. The
publishers have asked me to write a plant-breeding book as a
companion volume to Animal Breeding with a similar scope and in the
same style, and the present work is the result. As a young
geneticist, I started my career as a plant-breeding consultant with
the French firm of de Vilmorin Andrieux et Cie. After the first
years I became more and more absorbed in matters of theoretical
genetics, and during the last decade 1 have been chiefly concerned
with genetics as applied to man kind and to the breeding of
domestic animals. I have, how ever, never quite given up
plant-breeding matters, although the only kind of practical plant
breeding I have been more directly engaged upon has been the
production of sugar-beet seed. This book is certainly not a
textbook on Genetics, nor does it pretend to be an exhaustive
treatise of everything pertaining to plant breeding. As far as
possible, I have throughout the book avoided tht use of technical
and scientific terms where plain English would do as well. The book
is written in the first place for those who are actively engaged in
the ameliora tion of cultivated plants or in the creation of plant
novelties. I have quite an extensive experience of correspondence
with plant breeders and amateurs, and I have often co-operated with
plant breeders during some generations of their material,
discussing the results obtained and helping to decide future
breeding policy. This co-operation with so many people has 5 6
Plant Breeding helped to give me an understanding of apractical
plant breeders difficulties, and it has afforded me some experience
in explaining genetic complexities in simple terms. Plant breeding
and this is especially true of plant breeding in the larger
institutes is subject to fashions, and I have a notion that the
preoccupation with higher mathematics is due to a certain extent to
one of those fashions. I am convinced that there is very much more
in selection, and even in the comparison of the yield of
experimental plots, than in matters which can be ap proached only
by means of slide-rules and mechanical calculators. Even though the
breeding of plants nowadays is chiefly con centrated in the hands
of the bigger Institutes and the more important seed firms, there
are as appears from my experience large numbers of people
interested in plant-breeding subjects. Apart from the host of
amateur gardeners and lovers of flowers and fruit, there are
thousands of amateur plant breeders, lovers of gardening who sow an
occasional bed of dahlia seedlings or who raise a few hundred
seedling apple-trees or seedling roses. Since I started as a plant
breeder I have become greatly interested in some tropical
plant-breeding problems, and as my animal-breeding book seems to
have penetrated to all parts of the world, it seems to me that it
is necessary to treat of the amelioration of tropical plants as
well as of the breeding of plants in our temperate regions. I
collected my examples in the five different countries where I have
worked. The Dutch book has often been used as a textbook, and in
writing the present volume I have taken this possible use into
account. It is quite impossible to write a book on plant breeding
without going into some technicalgenetical details, and as
identical principles and phenomena are met with in both plant and
animal breeding, it is unavoidable that some of the first chapters
in both books treat of the same matter in much the same way. ..
General
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