Mutations.--Recently a new method of variation has been discovered by a Dutch naturalist, named Hugo de Vries. He found that new species of plants and animals arise suddenly by "mutations" or steps. This means that new species instead of arising from very slight variations, continuing during long periods of years (as Darwin believed), might arise very suddenly as a very great variation which would at once breed true. It is easily seen that such a condition would be of immense value to breeders, as new plants or animals quite unlike their parents might thus be formed and perpetuated. It will be one of the future problems of plant and animal breeders to isolate and breed "mutants," as such organisms are called. [Illustration: Improvement in corn by selection. To the left, the corn improved by selection from the original type at the right.] Artificial Selection.--Darwin reasoned that if nature seized upon favorable variants, then man, by selecting the variations he wanted, could form new varieties of plants or animals much more quickly than nature. And so to-day plant or animal breeders _select_ the forms having the characters they wish to perpetuate and breed them together. This method used by plant and animal breeders is known as _selection_. Selective Planting.--_By selective planting we mean choosing the best plants and planting the seed from these plants with a view of improving the yield._ In doing this we must not necessarily select the most perfect fruits or grains, but must select seeds from the _best plants_. A wheat plant should be selected not from its yield alone, but from its ability to stand disease and other unfavorable conditions. In 1862 a Mr. Fultz, of Pennsylvania, found three heads of beardless or bald wheat while passing through a large field of bearded wheat. These were probably _mutants_ which had lost the chaff surrounding the kernel. Mr. Fultz picked them out, sowed them by themselves, and produced a quantity of wheat now known favorably all over the world as the Fultz wheat. In selecting wheat, for example, we might breed for a number of different characters, such as more starch, or more protein in the grain, a larger yield per acre, ability to stand cold or drought or to resist plant disease. Each of these characters would have to be sought for separately and could only be obtained after long and careful breeding. The work of Mendel (see page 257) when applied to plant breeding will greatly shorten the time required to produce better plants of a given kind. By careful seed selection, some Western farmers have increased their wheat production by 25 per cent. This, if kept up all over the United States, would mean over $100,000,000 a year in the pockets of the farmers.