TRIUMPHS OF CROSSING.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXIX, Issue 143, 9 August 1911, Page 8

TRIUMPHS OF CROSSING.

Hidden in Hie special reports of the United States Department of Agriculture arc accounts of highly interesting and important achievements in hybridisation. A non typo of cow has been evolved, in a very curious way. Years ago a cattle man in Texas bought a sacred Indian humpbacked bull, known as the Zebu, irom a travelling circus, and kept it on his ranch as a pet. in time many hybrids appealed, all with the chararten’stics of the zebu. .Much of the ranch was marshy, and the native catilc sulfered greatly from the “fev-er-tick” that is endemic in such country. !( was observed, however, that the hyin ill cattle never took the complaint, and the reason for this was

made clear by a Government investigation. The zebu’s native habitat is the swamp lauds along the streams of India, and Nature has evolved for it a defence against poisonous insects in a gummy secretion of the skin. Tiiis, in the American hybiid, persists because rise environment emphasises its usefulness. Enormous tracts of marsh land along the coast ami the rivers are covered with luscious grass, and even in spite of the “tick,” ranchmen have found profit in using it for grazing. This hybrid, Lae “cattabu,” as it is called, v. ill increase the. profits considerably. Equally successful is the “stepmother” tree, by which slow-fruiting plants can be hurried to full bearing in a fourth of the usual time. Hie “step-mother” process is described as “an enforced union of the exposed inner surfaces of two trees, each still living at its root, until the sap runs freely from tlio elder to the younger, and then the root of the younger and the top of the older are-amputated.” Three years ago three seeds of the Australian finger lime wore received, and tlio plants grafted on to the “step-mother” tree. They began to bear last year, many years before their time under Nature, and they were crossed with the Californian lemon. The result, it is Imped, will be a valuable fruit having the qualities of tlio finger lime and the lemon. The main point is, however, that what, a generation ago, would I have taken sixteen years to determine, will now he ascertained in four. There is also that peculiar boast the zebroid, a cross between the zebra and the mule, a fast animal with groat staying power, and willing to cat anything. Luther Burbank pointed the way to those things, but it is said that in audacity ho has boon outdistanced by many’ of his pupils.