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The leading principle, however, is clearly indicated, and anyone who studies with care his method of working, may confidently attempt to improve the varieties of his own locality in the same way. This great principle of "variety-testing," as it has been founded by Le Couteur and Patrick Shirreff, has increased in importance ever since. Two main features are to be considered here.
During the best part of his life, in fact during the largest part of the first half of the nineteenth century, Shirreff worked according to a very simple principle. When quite young he had noticed that sometimes single plants having better qualities than the average were seen in the fields.
This was in the year 1859, and at that time Shirreff was the highest authority and the most successful breeder of cereals. Vilmorin's method had been applied only to beets, and Hallett had commenced his pedigree-cultures only a few years before and his first publication of the "Pedigree-wheat" appeared some years later at the International Exhibition of London in 1862.
The straw is taller and stronger, and each plant produces more culms and more heads. Shirreff assumed, that the original plant of this variety was a sport from the race in which he had found it, and that it was the only instance of this sport. He gives no details about this most interesting side of the question, omitting even to tell the name of the parent variety.
"Early Fellow," "Fine Fellow," "Longfellow" and "Early Angus" are very notable varieties introduced into trade in this way. Some years later Patrick Shirreff described his experiments and results in a paper entitled, "On the improvement of cereals," but the descriptions are very short, and give few details of systematic value.
This selection of species or species-selection was the work of Le Couteur and Patrick Shirreff, and is now in general use in practice where it has received the name of variety-testing. This clear and unequivocal term however, can hardly be included under the head of natural selection.
Then Shirreff changed his ideas and his method of working. Striking specimens appeared to be too rare, and the expectation of a profitable result too small. Therefore he began work on a larger scale. He sought and selected during the summer of 1857 seventy heads of wheat, each from a single plant showing some marked and presumably favorable peculiarity.
This second method of Shirreff evidently is quite analogous to the principle of Lagasca and Le Couteur. The previous assumption that new varieties with striking features were being produced by nature from time to time, was abandoned, and a systematic inquiry into the worth of all the divergent constituents of the fields was begun.
The main turnpike roads of the interior were greatly improved, but even on these long-distance traffic was expensive, and the by-roads, especially in the spring and autumn, were impassable except at a snail's pace. For traffic of town with town and province with province some means of transport less dependent on time and tide was urgently needed. Shirreff, A Tour through North America, p. 143.
But there is no reason to believe that the conditions in the fields of Scotland were different from those observed on the Isle of Jersey by Le Couteur. In the year 1862 Shirreff devoted himself to the selection of oats, searching for the best panicles from the whole country, and comparing their offspring in his experimental garden.
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