spacer
/ 13

Plantbreeding at Svalöf - continued...


This breeding method of Neergard – called 'systematic breeding' or simply 'the Svalöv-method' – was continued in its main lines by Nils Hjalmar Nilsson. And yet the latter maintained that Neergard had only carried out 'preparatory work for the development and control of a systematic breeding method'. An 'important innovation' had been introduced (Nilsson 1892, 125, 130). This innovation was highlighted in the scheme provided by Nilsson to explain Neergard's method. The category 'botanical, physical characters (botaniska, fysikaliska karakterer)' was inserted into the list in normal type instead of italics. Other than Neeergard, Nilsson had received an education in academic botany, and he thus exhibited a pronounced interest in morphological details. Thus he praised his predecessor for having introduced the 'classificator', an instrument for determining the 'density' of the ears of cereals in a single working step without complicated mathematical operations, but only to add a long discussion of this coefficient, resulting in the statement that 'ear density' correlates with 'strength of stem' and grain number per 100 mm of spindle length. The coefficient of 'density' , according to Nilsson, could thus provide the plant breeder with a means to attend to 'inner developmental dispositions (innere Bildungsanlagen) which until now lay outside his reach'. With 'inner developmental dispositions' Nilsson was referring to the morphological 'laws (Grundgesetze)' that that characterize the morphological structure of a plant (Anonymous 1890, 29-33).

Nilsson's way of reasoning was common among botanists at the end of the 19th century: It lay at the ground of taxonomically distinguishing plant species or varieties according to their morphological type, which, in its turn, was believed to be determined by (quasi-mechanical) laws of growth (Lenoir 1982). As a consequence, Nilsson saw his chief task in establishing and organising a collection of deviating forms (Nilsson 1892, 133). Already in the first two years of his appointment, Nilsson raised the number of cultivated cereal strains to 2000, each of these strains occupying its own, little parcel on the experimental station's acres (Anonymous 1893, 85). To grow this enormous number of varieties had become possible through an institutional reorganisation that the Swedish Seed Association underwent when Nilsson became its director.

Reference: Müller-Wille, Staffan. 2008. Plantbreeding at Svalöf: Instruments, Registers, Fieldwork. The Virtual Laboratory (ISSN 1866-4784), https://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/references?id=art69&page=p0003