Jersey, 1837.) on his farm on the isle of Jersey, who cultivated upwards of
150 varieties of wheat, which he claimed were as pure as those of any other
agriculturalist. But Professor La Gasca of Madrid, who visited him, drew
attention to aberrant ears, and pointed out, that some of them might be
better yielders than the majority of plants in the crop, whilst others
might be poor types. Thence he concluded that the isolation of the better
ones might be a means of increasing his crops. Le Couteur seems to have
considered the constancy of such smaller types after isolation as
absolutely probable, since he did not even discuss the possibility of their
being variable or of their yielding a changeable or mixed progeny. This
curious fact proves that he considered the types, discovered in his fields
by La Gasca to be of the same kind as his other varieties, which until that
time he had relied upon as being pure and uniform. Thus we see, that for
him, the variability of cereals was what we now call polymorphy. He looked
through his fields for useful aberrations, and collected twenty-three new
types of wheat. He was, moreover, clear about one point, which, on being
rediscovered after half a century, has become the starting-point for the
new Swedish principle of selecting agricultural plants. It was the
principle of single-ear sowing, instead of mixing the grains of all the
selected ears together. By sowing each ear on a separate plot he intended
not only to multiply them, but also to compare their value. This
comparison ultimately led him to the choice of some few valuable sorts, one
of which, the "Bellevue de Talavera," still holds its place among the
prominent sorts of wheat cultivated in France. This variety seems to be
really a uniform type, a quality very useful under favourable conditions of
cultivation, but which seems to have destroyed its capacity for further
improvement by selection.

The principle of single-ear sowing, with a view to obtain pure and uniform
strains without further selection, has, until a few years ago, been almost