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Every botanist who has studied the agricultural practice of plant-breeding, or the causes of the geographic distribution of plants, will easily recall to his mind numerous similar cases. Perhaps the most striking instance is afforded by cultivated biennial plants. The most important of them are forage-beets and sugar-beets.
The assertion that the sundry varieties of forage-beets are not the result of artificial selection, is supported in a large measure by the historic fact that the most of them are far older than the method of conscious selection of plants itself. This method is due to Louis Vilmorin and dates from the middle of the last century.
The red forage-beets which are now cultivated on so large a scale, had been introduced from Italy into France only a short time before.
Hence we may conclude that a strict and unexcelled process of selection has been applied to the destruction of this tendency, not only for sugar-beets, since Vilmorin's time, when selection had become a well understood process, but also for forage-beets since the beginning of beet culture.
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