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Even sugar-beets, the oldest "selected" agricultural plants, are far from having freed themselves from the necessity of continuous improvement. Without this they would not remain constant, but would retrograde with great rapidity. The double meaning of the word selection still prevailed when Darwin published his "Origin of Species."
Leaving the comparative hardness of the road, we started to make our way to the mouth of a communication trench through what had evidently once been a field of sugar-beets and instantly sank to our knees in mire that seemed to be a mixture of molasses, glue, and porridge. It seemed as though some subterranean monster had seized my feet with its tentacles and was trying to drag me down.
In some parts of the West there is a lack of decaying vegetable matter in the soil, because the few plants which naturally grow there have small roots, and leave little vegetable material behind when they decay. For this condition one of the best crops to employ in rotation is sugar-beets, because they strike many small roots deep into the earth.
Of the remaining subspecies, one comprises the numerous sorts cultivated as forage-crops and the other the true sugar-beets. Both of them vary widely as to the shape and the size of the roots, the quality of the tissue, the foliage and other characteristics. Some of these forms, no doubt, have originated during culture.
Then, one morning when I had about got over the bashfulness about the hollyhocks, and had decided to deny them absolutely and stick to it, for a time at least, I happened to pick up Grandmother Nelson's book. It was full time maybe past time for thinning out my sugar-beets and resetting my cosmos.
After explaining who he was I told him I had recognized him on sight we opened with a volley of small shot. We peppered one another with harmless comments on the weather and the state of the crops. He advanced cabbages and I countered with sugar-beets. I am quite aware that there are good tacticians who deprecate the use of skirmish lines and the desultory fire of the musketry of small talk.
First of all, fluctuating variability is an almost universal phenomenon. Every organ and every quality may exhibit it. Some are very variable, while others seem quite constant. Shape and size vary almost indefinitely, and the chemical composition is subject to the same law, as is well known for the amount of sugar in sugar-beets.
Vegetables and refuse from the kitchen help out in this matter, but seldom furnish a sufficient supply. Vegetables may be grown for this purpose. Mangels and sugar-beets are excellent. Cabbage, potatoes and turnips answer the purpose fairly well. Mangels are fed by splitting in halves and sticking to nails driven in the wall.
One of these causes is the quantity of watery fluid in the tissues, and this in its turn is dependent on the culture in dryer or moister soil, and on the amount of moisture in the air, and the same variety of sugar-beets yields higher percentage-figures in a dry region than in a wet one.
"Wind and water," they said; "that's all these children are. They've no stamina. Sugar-beets are the most economic means of just keeping the body and the soul together." The lights are going out in the Casino. It is the hour when, in the old days, life would be becoming most feverish about the gaming tables.
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