PLANT BREEDING BY A. L. HAGEDOORN, Ph. D. Privaatdocent, State
University, Leiden Formerly Secretary, Nederlandsche Genetixhe
Vereeniging Soesterberg, Holland LONDON CROSBY LOCKWOOD SON LTD. 39
THURLOE STREET, S. W. 7 1950 Preface wenty years ago I wrote my
Handbook of Animal and Plant Breeding in the Dutch language, and my
Animal Breeding, published in 1 939, 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 somegenerations 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 a practical 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.TheDutchbookhasoftenbeen used as atextbook, 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 technical genetical 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. As far as possible I have
tried to avoid duplica tions, by using different examples to
illustrate the principles...
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