* * THE ABBOT AND THE FARMER.
Theorists on agriculture are continually laying emphasis on the need of scientific education. Perhaps they hardly realize how very great the advance in this direction has been. Quaint evidence may be given. A seedsman's catalogue has just reached me from Norfolk—that hub of agricultural progress ; and it opens with the following para- graph : " Thanks to the discoveries of Mendel (Abbot of Brunn; -in Austria) who published a paper in 1886 on the cross-breeding of peas, modern breeders are now able to work on definite lines and remarkable progress has been made during the last 20 years in the improvement of the farm crops of this country.", ,Imagine the seller of.the last century talking to his farmer, clients of the Abbot of Brunn: The catalogue in question is compact of scientific tit-bits of information, with `a photograph of " mother beets encased in muslin to prevent inoculation " ! The beet as well as the science is a sign of the times. The general advance owes a great- deal to that real genius in hybridization, Sir Roland Biffen, the creator of Yeoman wheat, and indeed to the Cambridge School in general. Professor Punnet, the leading experimenter on " sex-linked characteristics " in poultr> is as admirable a popularizer of the Mendelian theory as he is a practicer, With both of them, as with the so-called plant Wizard of America, the chief successes spring direct from the first discovery (though it was earlier than 1886) of the Abbot of Brunn.
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