Improvement of the Sugar Beet

SUGARCANE and sugar beet are the important sources of sugar. This foodstuff, wldcli today is one of the purest and cheapest in our dietary, two centuries ago was a luxury available only to the rich. The story of the rise of sugar production to meet an ever-increasing demand is a romance of agriculture and chemistry. The accomplishments of the plant breeder and the chemical engineer in making this contribution to the world's food supply rank in significance with such important contributions to human welfare as the introduction of the potato or the invention of the cotton gin. Today sugar is a part of the diet of everyone, and the per-capita consumption is associated with the standard of living of a nation. It is a common statement in this series of articles on breeding and genetics that the wild progenitors of our crop plants are not known; there are diverse opinions, in many cases, even about the places of their origin. Primitive peoples wrested these plants from nature, improved, and conserved them. They come to us as the heritage of the past, the steps in their development being matters of siirmise or conjecture. We can reconstruct the course of their development only on the basis of our own experience or from the theories of plant and animal evolution and dispersal. In the article on sugarcane a glimpse is afforded of the probable course of development of this plant. The observations by Brandes (6) on the nurture of sugarcane among the primitive tribes of New Guinea supply a pattern of the course which the aborigines at a similar stage of development may have followed with their food plants. The tribal beliefs and practices reported by Brandes throw light on primitive methods of selection and husbandry, and they indicate what mankind at the dawn of history probably did with various plant forms on which he was dependent. In sharp contrast to this reconstruction of the past and inference concerning it, we deal in the case of the sugar beet with a development reaching back not more than 150 years. The winning of this sugar plant from the common stock of beets used chiefly as feed for animals was done by known historical figures who left some written record of